It is July 1986. Holding Back The Years by Simply Red is at number one. Crocodile Dundee and Big Trouble in Little China are at, or heading for, the cinema. We sit in the cab of the truck eating sandwiches and listening to the radio. You can smell the black plastic of the dashboard heated up by the sun. The dashboard is full of cigarette packets, crisp packets, petrol coupons, invoices covered in dirty fingerprints. Neil, my mentor hasn't washed his hands before eating so neither have I. I don't want to look like a gaylord.
"Don't worry, you get used to eating concrete sandwiches in this job," says Neil.
This job is my first job; a trainee bricklayer. I left school a month before, managing a whole four hours of revision. I haven't been back to the school to collect my results, there's no point. I have failed. Fortunately I won't be needing them. I'm training to be a bricklayer and when I'm older, say nineteen, I'll build my own house in the country.
My mentor switches on the ignition, steps on the gas and we head towards the next job. It's my second week here and I'm already proving inept at the job. Infact, apart from the weekly brown pay packet the only thing I'm really enjoying is the driving round to the next job. The inbetween bit where you stare out the window and take in the summer breeze. The work itself is proving too much. Mixing cement, loading and unloading tools and bricks from the van, running up wooden planks with wheelbarrows of rubble. I'm using muscles that have never been touched before and I'm aching from head to foot before we even start work. The one thing I did enjoy, was the breezeblock wall I built as part of an extension in Gordon road. I feel a brief flicker of having achieved something.
It's been downhill ever since. As I prove increasingly inept to do the job, my mentor tries to rise me out of my state by constantly having a go at me. The jobs get worse. One morning I have to spend shovelling rubble into a skip. All this for £55 a week. The boss calls me in, ostensibly to help him, but really to lecture me telling me he doesn't expect blood, sweat and tears but he does expect effort. As a motivational talk it's an F. He's had blood, sweat, tears and effort.
I start dreading going into work. I sit in the van and work it out. Twenty days holiday a year. Forty-nine years till I can retire. I'm only sixteen. I have to get out of this, but how? At school they'd drummed into us the importance of getting and holding down a job. The importance of supporting yourself and standing on your own two feet. There was mass unemployment out there. I should be grateful. Maybe I could get someone else to build me my house in the country?
I seal my fate a week later. At the Salvation Army place on Rushams road, I bang a load of nails into the suspended ceiling missing the wooden beams underneath, so when the boss comes to inspect my work he sees a load of nails hanging uselessly through the ceiling.
Five weeks after I start my first job, my career as a bricklayer has ended. It is the start of an uneasy relationship with full time work. I walk home through the park, my wages and my P45 in my pocket. I feel bad; I've been sacked from my first ever full time job. I also feel massively relieved. Getting up at seven am to have people having a go at you all day long is no way to spend your life. The sun is shining and I have nowhere to go. I walk home with a spring in my step.
A few days later my parents drive me to the school to collect my exam results. I have four CSEs and no O levels to my name.
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