WHEN I was 16 years old I was attending a "good" southside school in Dublin, playing in a makey uppey band with some class mates and prey to many of the standard shortcomings of a teenager in 1960. That is to say, I knew Eddie Coehran lived in Heaven, I knew girls were frightening and mysterious and I knew I could do no wrong.
That year, for the first time, some of us had started thinking seriously about a summer job. We'd heard the older boys bragging about their adventures working at the legendary Bird's Eye factory in England, washing up at Butlin's holiday camps and two heroes who had actually picked grapes in France. To us, these adventures sounded as exotic as, say, Marco Polo exploring the Far East. The thought of being away from home, being free of parental restraint, actually being in a foreign country was so heady that we could barely imagine it.
In reality, there was no point in even trying to imagine it. As far as my little group of friends was concerned, there wasn't a hope in hell that our parents would agree to let us off on our own, especially out of the country. For myself, I'd managed to get myself into enough trouble without leaving Terenure. So we all decided to settle for anything we could get locally, and started to work on answering newspaper ads for almost anything, with varying degrees of success.
Two of the lads struck gold almost immediately, one going to the "Fridge Gang" in Dublin Dairies and the other to a (withhindsight) potentially, lethal job, cutting fish in a chip shop in Kimmage. For myself, it turned out to be my father who worked the oracle.
Mr K, whose son also attended our school, was an acquaintance of my father and also something important in CIE. During a casual conversation, he agreed to "find something" for me, and so it was on a July morning in 1960 I reported for work at Kingsbridge Station, as it was then's called (now it's Heuston Station).
Up to then, my experience of paid employment had been limited to the odd grass cutting enterprise, the occasional foray into errand running for neighbours and to one unfortunate and never to be forgotten episode when I cockily agreed to shoot the Collie dog of a Dutch widow in Jobstown, using her own shotgun. (That one will live with me forever!) Still, nothing in my life had prepared me for the sheer mind numbing uproar of noise and activity in the giant cavern of glass, iron and concrete that was Kingsbridge Station.
Elegant in my entirely unsuitable school blazer, with collar and tie (detachable collar - olden days or what?), I presented myself at the Station Master's office, presuming that to be the place for a new employee to report. When I eventually caught someone's attention things didn't get any better.
"What?" said a man with sticky outs ears and a greasy uniform.
"I'm supposed to start work here today," I said. He looked at me for a long moment, paying particular attention to my stupid blazer and spoke.
"Where?" he asked. I didn't know.
"As what?" he asked. I didn't know. As he looked at me with amused contempt, I began to realise that I hadn't really thought this through. The "something" that Mr K had found for me hadn't been specified.
"Anyway," the man smirked, "you should be at Personnel, not here."
With a sense that this wasn't going at all well, I went back out into the slamming, shouting, engine shunting racket and was directed to Personnel. As I walked down the platform, the wind whistled through this man made canyon, although outside the sun shone on a breezeless Dublin. If this, was the real world, I thought, I was having second thoughts. Suddenly the comfortable cocoon of school, friends and family didn't seem so bad.
THINGS were a little better in Personnel. At least they didn't smirk. They were just mystified as the others as to why I was there but appeared to be, making a genuine effort to solve the mystery. Under questioning, Mr K's name came up, along with the information that his son was a schoolmate and I saw them look at each other with resigned comprehension. A sort of conference was held with their backs to me, interspersed with glances at the audible references to "bloody students". There was also an even less audible slur on Mr K's antecedents.
Eventually they brought me to a small office just behind the bar and cafeteria where they introduced me to the sole occupant, a tall, stern looking woman called Miss Geraghty. After another whispering session, this one interspersed with disbelieving looks from the unfortunate Miss G, they left us to our mutual fate. A long silence was broken by my new boss saying: "Well Jim, what are we going to do with you?" I didn't know. She looked distractedly around the little office. "There's really nothing for you to do," she almost wailed. Well, that was actually alright with me and I waited with stolid calm to be told where I was to do nothing and how I was to spend my working day.
Suddenly her face lit up. "Can you type?" she asked. "Well, I can a little bit," I said. Well, I couldn't at all. I'd seen typewriters, of course, but that was the height of it. Miss G wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. "Every morning," she said, "you ring the chef at Westland Row, get the lunch menu and type it out for the cafeteria."
"Right," I said efficiently. This was more like it. Gainful employment at last. I was actually going to earn my £3 17s 6p per week.
And that's what I did for the next three weeks. Nothing else. At least nothing that I was supposed to be doing. With all the free time at my disposal, my well known propensity for mischief was given free rein. The first storm clouds on the horizon appeared after I was caught treating young, rural porters to free soft drinks from the crates in the store room. Somehow they had got the impression that I was entitled to do this because I was in charge of all the stores in Kingsbridge. Maybe it was something I said, something like "I'm in charge of all the stores" in Kingsbridge". I somehow managed to talk my way out of that one and indeed out of the row over writing "spuds" instead of "potatoes" on the official menu. (I was told later that a group of American tourists thought it was "charming".) But the crime that eventually convinced CIE that we had no future together was altogether unforgivable.
Next door to our office was a small room containing, among other things, a machine for cleaning silverware. This consisted of a large drum, like the one used for raffle tickets. It was filled with ball bearings and soapy water and I soon discovered that with a handful of the ball bearings, a pencil and six shallow holes gouged in my's office table, I could have a perfectly good game of miniature snooker with the aforementioned rural lads. Unfortunately, when this palled I decided that it might be fun to use the pencil to poke the ball bearings into various sandwiches on display in the cafeteria. Thankfully, this idiocy was discovered before someone broke a tooth, or worse.
Anyway, Mr K or no Mr K, that was the end. My feet never touched the ground on the way out. My only, regrets were that I'd let my father down and also Miss Geraghty, whom I'd grown to love. When she let her stem appearance slip, she had the slew of a woman who wouldn't be averse to poking the odd foreign body into the odd sandwich herself.
My next summer job was in the fabled Bird's Custard factory in Birmingham, where I discovered Irish folk music.
A silver lining or what?
