The Sound of Laughter (2 page)

We drove to an industrial park on the outskirts of town and finally he turned to me and said:

'Right, now it's your turn.' Thank God for that, there was only twenty minutes left.

I found sitting behind a steering wheel a very liberating experience. It was the first one I'd sat behind since the dodgems at Southport Pleasure Park. But this was much better, especially because I didn't have some gyppo hanging off the back of my seat asking me for a quid.

I'd spent my whole life dreaming of this moment. Ever since I'd played with toy cars as a child. Pushing
them round on the floor in the back room at home, in and out of table legs, over my dad's slippers, making that engine noise, you know the one, the higher the gear, the higher the humming noise. I'd drive it as far as the tips of my fingers would stretch and then with a screech of brakes I'd spin it around and drive it back towards me. Matchbox, Corgi, I had the lot, sports cars, buses, even a London taxi. I'd line them up along the fireplace. Then they'd take part in the biggest race in the world until my mum shouted me for tea.

If I wasn't playing with cars then I'd be lying on the floor in front of the TV drawing them, designing them. I drew supercars, cars that could fly, cars that performed spectacular stunts I'd seen in James Bond films or anything with Burt Reynolds. I drew cars in every colour my bumper pack of felt tips would allow.

With this love of cars you can imagine my joy on Christmas Day in 1980 when Father Christmas brought me a 'Race 'n' Chase'. 'Yee-ha,' I screamed in the naff American accent that I'd seen in the advert a thousand times on TV (well, it feels like a thousand times when you're seven). It was a fantastic end to a tough few weeks. My dad had lost his job and some fella called John Lennon had been shot and everybody seemed to be crying all the time.

I couldn't wait to get it out of the box and play with
it but all that had to wait till after we got back from Christmas Day Mass. I was so made up that Santa had brought it for me. With the usual threats from my parents of 'no presents' unless I behaved, things had been a bit touch and go for a while.

The emotional blackmail of Christmas has become an epidemic with parents these days.

They've successfully managed to twist a harmless folk tale into an opportunity for a bit of peace and quiet. I caught a couple of close friends of mine (who will remain anonymous for my own safety) telling their four-year-old son that if he saw the red light flash on the alarm sensor in the corner of the room it meant that Father Christmas was watching him and checking he was being a good boy. Then I watched the four-year-old tiptoe around the room with his eyes fixed on the sensor. And every time it lit up, he'd wave at it and smile. It's extraordinary what people will do for a bit of peace. It's almost as bad as the mother who told all her children that whenever they heard the ice-cream van chiming, it actually meant it'd run out of ice cream. Now that is cruel.

Eventually I discovered, like all children do, that Father Christmas didn't exist, only I had the grave misfortune of finding out on Christmas Eve.

I was lying in bed with one eye open, straining to hear
the sound of sleigh bells, when instead I heard my parents shouting in the front street. I immediately jumped out of bed and climbed up on to my bedding box so that I could get a better look out of the window.

I could see my dad and he'd dropped what appeared to be a bin bag full of toys on the ground. I could make out an Etch-a-Sketch out of its box in the snow and a Tonka Toy Dump Truck.

'Bloody hell, Deirdre,' he shouted to my mum who was busy chasing a Girl's World doll's head as it rolled down the road and into the gutter.

Devastated, I climbed back under my duvet. How could they have lied to me all these years? How could so many people have kept it a secret from me? And why had they got me an Etch-a-Sketch when they knew damn well I wanted an Atari games console with free Pac-Man and Frogger?

I must admit I'd had been having my own suspicions about Father Christmas's existence.

The theory that one man could deliver presents to all the world's houses in one night? The magic-key theory? And one lone gunman firing from the top of the book depository when there was a second shot from the grassy knoll. Hold on, I've got all my theories mixed up.

Darren Martyn had said something at school about Father Christmas being 'a load of bollocks'. Then again,
you could never believe anything he said. He came to school in a special taxi and was always touching his privates. He sells insurance now and drives a Mazda.

I'd also had my doubts when I was singing 'Jingle Bells' at the children's Christmas party down at the club. We had to sing it nine times as loud as we could before Father Christmas eventually appeared from behind the fire door. I knew something wasn't right as he was in a wheelchair and was wearing grey slip-on shoes. I'll never forget it.

But the shameful scene I witnessed in the front street that Christmas Eve confirmed my suspicions for ever. Crushed and inconsolable, I cried myself to sleep that night. It was just too much for a boy of nineteen to take in.

'Now put your left foot down on the clutch and lift your right foot up off the accelerator until you feel your biting point,' said Raymond. Biting point? Hadn't we just had one of them back at home with the hamster? But Raymond still kept chanting it over and over again. 'Biting point, biting point.' I didn't understand what he was saying. It was like being back in Electronics at school with Mr Booth, only now I wasn't trying to make a disco rope light, I was trying to drive a car.

'Lift your right foot up and put your left foot down, up, down, up, down,' he said impatiently. I was
desperate to sing the 'Hokey-Cokey' back to him but I knew he wouldn't have been amused. I just did what he said and miraculously I started to feel the car come alive. My heart began to race as I felt the engine revving up and I thought, 'That's me, I'm doing that,' and with a huge smile across my face I raised my right foot off the accelerator, stalled the engine and we both lunged forward.

'Never mind,' said Raymond, 'let's take five,' then he got out his pipe and started to light it.

Take five? It's taken me three-quarters of an hour to get this far, you can't stop now. But we did. He chatted to me about a number of things, the previous night's episode of
Twin Peaks,
the effect that Velcro has had on our everyday lives and the death of Sammy Davis Jr to which he remarked, 'We was robbed.'

I was completely gobsmacked, infuriated and gobsmacked again!

Finally he let me have one more go at starting the car. I stalled it again. Then we swapped places and drove home in silence. Well, apart from Raymond whistling the theme from
Twin Peaks.

He pulled up beside the laundrette.

'So same time next week then?' he said as I got out of the car.

I nodded back at him politely but inside I was
seething. Twelve bloody pounds and for what? A quarter of an hour behind the wheel and two lungs full of pipe smoke.

Maybe I expected too much on my first lesson? I had thought he might have let me go for a spin on the motorway or maybe even drive through some cardboard boxes down a backstreet, like Starsky and Hutch. But no.

I had a few more lessons with Raymond, but things didn't really improve and I soon began to realise why it'd taken my mum three attempts to pass. We did get round to covering some basic manoeuvres – how to do a three-point turn and what pipe shag to buy from the duty-free shop in Ostend. But after nine lessons with Raymond I'd had enough. I'd also had enough of him smoking that bloody awful pipe. My clothes would stink when I got home and my driving was starting to become dangerous as I couldn't see out of the windscreen half of the time for tobacco smoke. My grandad was right when he said that anybody who smokes a pipe has got two arseholes.

The final straw came when he promised to show me some photos of his holiday to Bulgaria. I cancelled my next lesson, permanently. What a waste of time and money, and the question still remained: would I ever learn to drive?

I used to have a paper round every night after school. I'd be out delivering the
Bolton Evening News,
in all weathers. It was a proper paper round too, for paying customers. I wasn't pretending to deliver the free papers by dumping them in the canal and pocketing the money like some folk did. I'll not name names but you know who you are. No, I was one of the many devoted paper boys and girls of this country, staggering around the streets of suburbia developing a curvature of the spine and other irreversible damage to our already fragile lumbar regions.

God only knows what shape we'll all be in, or indeed what shape we'll
be,
in years to come. All of us walk this earth with the knowledge that our backs could go at any
moment and like a human game of Ker-Plunk it'll only be a matter of time before one wrong move will send us all crashing to the floor.

And no doubt my back will go at the worst possible moment, probably in years from now when I'm in the middle of a special charity
It's a Knockout
tournament, live on ITV6. I'll be up to my eyes in mud, dressed as Mr Blobby scrambling alongside John Leslie OBE and I'll suddenly hear a crack.

Or it could happen when I'm simply changing the bin bag in the kitchen. With the remains of yesterday's Sunday dinner smeared all over my fingers, I wobble up the path in that fine rain (that soaks you through) towards the wheelie bin and suddenly feel a twinge. I fall to my knees in agony and that's when a million evening papers will take their revenge (and don't forget there was also a property guide on Wednesdays). I've come to the conclusion over the years that thanks to the
Bolton Evening News
my body is now a walking time bomb.

But the weight of my sack never bothered me when I was fifteen; it was just a paper round to me and the one thing keeping me going was the £3.50 wage I got at the end of each week. That was a lot of money to me at the time – after all I had nothing else to judge it by – but it would pale into insignificance when I left school and got
my first proper, grown-up job in a factory down the road.

My mate's dad had pulled a few strings, in fact if truth be told he did his own puppet shows (I'm joking of course). He managed to get me an interview with one of the supervisors, well, I say interview, an unshaven bloke with a stutter drove up to me in a forklift truck, nodded his head and shouted,

'He'll d-d-d-d-d-do, you can s-s-s-start M-M-M-Monday.'

Imagine my shock when I discovered I'd get a wage of £3.50 an hour, not a week, but £3.50 an hour. I was as happy as Larry as I danced home in the rain (who's Larry?). My mind filled with thoughts of how I was going to spend my first big wage. What was I going to do with all that money? Why, learn to drive of course and buy the original soundtrack to the motion picture
Buster
on cassette.

I'd passed my new workplace almost every day of my life. It was on the main bus route into town past the Esso garage, the only one on the road with a deluxe car wash, opened by Henry Cooper. Further down was the Co-op, later taken over by Spar (so near so Spar) where my mum used to treat me to a Tunnock's Teacake if I was good and an empty cardboard box to play with when I got home. Then there was the Kazee's Silk Centre, Quintin's
Electrical which was massive (my nana said they wouldn't be happy till they owned the whole block) and the ever-glorious pop factory. My heart would always soar if I saw one of the many lorries rattling out of the gates loaded up with a million rainbow-coloured bottles on its back. Enough chemically coloured pop to last you a lifetime. At the bottom of the road stood a huge white factory. I must have seen the factory workers filing in and out of the iron gates hundreds of times over the years, but never once had I imagined that I'd be joining them.

Called F. H. Lee's, the company mainly manufactured tissue products. It was owned by the ex-Manchester City and England player, Francis Lee. When most footballers hang up their boots they progress naturally into the lucrative world of football commentary, but Franny had decided that his financial security lay in making bog rolls.

Apparently Mr Lee visited his factory on the odd occasion, but our paths never crossed. One thing I do know is that he knew how to look after his workers. At Christmas everybody got the choice of three gifts: a big bottle of whisky, a big turkey or a big tin of Quality Street.
^*1
I of course opted for a stroll down Quality Street
and was presented with my gift the last Friday before Christmas.

With my willpower intact I'd managed to keep the tin of Quality Street sealed ready to give to my mum. But when I went to clock out at the end of my shift while trying to hold the tin under my arm, I lost balance and watched on helplessly as it smashed to the floor in slow motion, sending the chocolates shooting off in all directions.

Funnily enough, I wasn't short of assistance when it came to picking them up. I just wish they'd been as eager to hand them back to me, instead of sticking fistfuls of them into either their pockets or their mouths, whichever came first.

Heartbroken, I trudged home in the snow with the dented tin under my arm and I still remember the look of confusion my mum gave me on Christmas morning when she opened a tin of Quality Street to find sixteen chocolates (all hard ones), three buttons and a paper clip. Bastards.

We had no luck with chocolates that Christmas. My Uncle Finton drove up from London in his metallic-green Jaguar on a flying visit. As he left (after eating us out of house and home) he pulled a tin of Quality Street out the boot as a parting gift.

I've no idea if Uncle Finton was aware that his
chocolates were a year past their sell-by date but it didn't take us long to find out, when we ended up bringing in the New Year with severe stomach cramps and the shits. So memorable was our discomfort that such ailments are now referred to in our house as 'going for a jog down Quality Street'.

Mr Lee's generosity didn't just stop at Christmas, oh God, no. Every fortnight he gave his workers 'a pack'. This consisted of a large polythene bag filled up with every product that the factory produced. You were given six toilet rolls (in a choice of assorted colours), a patterned kitchen roll, some industrial cling film and two rolls of the finest aluminium foil this side of Wigan. Well, my mum was over the moon when I first brought it home, she'd never seen as much foil and cling film in her life. In fact, it's seventeen years since I worked at Franny Lee's and I'm sure she's still got some of that industrial cling film on top of the cupboard somewhere.

I was told that Mr Lee and his associates made the noble gesture in an effort to put an end to the huge amount of thieving that was going on at the factory. Apparently staff were increasingly prone to jamming kitchen foil down their knickers and smuggling it home. It's like my Uncle Ronnie used to say:

'If it's not nailed down, I'll nick it.' Perhaps not the
best motto to live your life by, especially if you work for Securicor like he did.

The job I'd got was on the evening shift so I only worked from five to nine, which was a bit like the Dolly Parton song but reversed. My mum used to make me a packed lunch every night and I was ready for it, I can tell you. Two tuna-mayonnaise-spread sandwiches, wrapped in foil (there was going to be no shortage of that from now on) and a couple of mint Yo Yos.

'Be careful at work and don't forget to give me three rings,' she shouted to me on my first night as I ran for the bus.

I remember feeling very nervous as I approached the gates. It was that noise. It got louder as I got nearer. I'd heard the noise of machinery many times when I was growing up. My dad was a labourer at various factories around town and sometimes I'd walk home from work with him – well, he'd walk, I'd ride my Grifter. While I was waiting for him to clock off I'd stand outside the factory listening to that noise of machinery. It was loud enough standing outside the factory – how much louder must it have sounded inside? After all these years the time had come for me to finally find out.

I followed a few other workers into the canteen. I think it was a canteen, as there was a drinks vending
machine in the corner of the room. I looked at the picture on the front of it. A bone-china cup and saucer were perched on a white lace doily. Fresh tea was being poured into the cup, and out of focus in the distance, beyond the terrace, there was a field. I could just make out the blurred shapes of women in saris picking tea in the baking sunlight. That's why I was somewhat disappointed when I pushed the button labelled 'Tea' and after forty seconds and numerous bangs I was rewarded with a polystyrene cup which hesitantly began to fill up with a liquid that looked like Bisto gravy granules mixed with saliva. A whistle blew somewhere and everybody got up to leave. I had a quick sip as I headed for the door and, as I'd suspected, it tasted sod all like the Queen's English tea that I'd come to love and respect over the years.

Like a little lost sheep and without making eye contact I got to the back of the queue. I followed the others as they clocked on. Eventually it was my turn but I started to panic when I couldn't find a clocking-in card with my name on.

'Don't worry, I've still not got one and I've been here a month,' said a voice over my shoulder. I turned round to be greeted by a blond-haired lad wearing a faded Curiosity Killed the Cat tour T-shirt (I think it was the 'Misfit' tour of '86). His name was Mick Santiago and we
were to become work buddies over the next few months. In fact, we even stayed in touch after Mick got sacked for getting someone else to clock in for him. He was enjoying a weekend at the Reading Festival and would have got away with it if he hadn't been caught on camera dancing to Transvision Vamp in a crowd shot. Apparently one of the supervisors almost choked on his beer when he saw it on the big screen down the pub. Mick got his P45 first thing Monday morning, but I think he was more upset about being caught on camera singing 'Baby I Don't Care' than he was about losing his job.

He went on the dole and I didn't see him for a while. Then he turned up at my front door one night out of the blue and so I invited him in for a cup of tea.

He was wittering on about how he'd been on a weekend retreat with Jobseekers and had caught the clap off a black Swedish midget. He said he then spent six hours queuing at the STD clinic just to have 'some bird jam an umbrella up my bell-end'. Then he ate all my mum's ginger nuts and left.

I slammed the front door, ran upstairs and spent the rest of the night scrubbing the bog with every type of cleaner I could get my mum's yellow Marigolds on. I even gave it a splash with some holy water from Lourdes that I found under the sink. (Well, you can never be too careful, can you?)

The last time I heard of Mick he'd fallen for a girl down at the Church of the Nazarene and was playing bass in a Christian steel band. They were on a 'The Lord Loves a Sinner' tour performing at a variety of prisons the length and breadth of Great Britain.

But that's a different story. Right now he was taking me to meet the foreman. I turned the corner to find what I can only describe as a truly overwhelming sight. There were literally hundreds of women frantically bashing away on production lines – I could barely make them out for the tissue paper that hung in the air, like a sunlit fog. The other thing I couldn't fail to notice was the heat – it wrapped round me like a blanket. The noise was incredible now, a combination of machinery pumping out tissue product, screeching forklifts, the raucous laughter of the women and Bobby Brown singing 'My Prerogative'. To this day I still get butterflies when I hear that song.

'So who gave you the job? Was it Morris?' said Mick as he led me towards the foil room

'I don't know his name. He drove a forklift and had a stutter.'

'Yeah, that's Morris Minor, he's a d-d-d-dickhead,' he laughed. I smiled nervously; for all I knew Mick could have suffered from a stutter too. They all could.

Morris Minor (I was about to find out) was a
nickname, after a hit novelty song that was around at the time called 'Stutter Rap'. The trouble was he had no idea people called him that.

'Hello, Morris. We met last week,' I said, hesitantly offering him a handshake.

'What the fuck do you mean, "Morris"?... My name's Ian.'

It was then the penny dropped and I could feel Mick laughing behind me.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

'Yeah, well. .. just watch yourself, OK? Right, I want you to do a bit of shit shifting for me tonight.'

I didn't like the sound of that.

'I'm sticking you on the bins. Have you ever used a jack lift before?' he said as he nodded towards another lad pulling a pallet with one.

'Yeah, no problem,' I said confidently. Then I swear I had a look round to see who'd said it. I couldn't believe it was me, I'd never used one of those things in my life. I'd seen them down the supermarket often enough, being pulled round by blokes built like brick shithouses, but I'd never even touched one. What possessed me to say it I'll never know but within twenty minutes of being left alone with this thing I'd created a hole the size of a small crater in a plasterboard wall.

I glanced around. Nobody had noticed so, feeling
strangely confident, I decided to try and drag a two-ton steel bin, piled high with rubbish, out to the crushing machine. I was quite proud of myself. I slid the forks underneath the bin. I jacked it up no bother at all, I even managed to drag it outside to the car park and then I lowered it. . . straight on to my foot. The following ten minutes were a complete blur and the next thing I remember I was sat in a pickup truck being driven by Morris Minor himself on my way to A&E.

'J-J-J-J-J-J-Just what d-d-d-do you think you w-w-w-w-w-were doing, you d-d-d-d-dopey prick?' he snarled at me at the lights. 'I thought y-y-y-you said you c-c-c-could use one?'

I just shrugged and mumbled, 'Dunno.' All I could do was stare at my big toe, which was starting to resemble something out of a
Tom & Jerry
cartoon. I could actually see it throbbing and it was beginning to turn a violent shade of maroon. I hadn't been in the job an hour and already I was going to get sacked. Good going, Peter.