Lowlife 64 – Failing to Deliver

Failing to Deliver

By Dominic Horton

I was disappointed to not have the opportunity to read the Halesowen News this week after the errant paperboy failed to deliver the publication to Codger Mansions.  The News fills in the gaps in my knowledge of happenings in the parish that I do not hear about in the Flagon & Gorses and as such it is a vital resource for a writer of a column such as this, so its absence can be costly.  Mind you I can hardly complain as when I used to deliver the News as a boy I regularly overlooked delivery to a house on the basis that it was a little way away from the other dwellings on the round.  The elderly occupants of the house were always efficient in lodging their complaint to the News offices and I always used to wonder why anyone would want to read such a boring local newspaper in the first place.  Karma has it that I am now in the position of the pensioners in question and my keen anticipation of receipt of the local newspaper means that unwittingly I have officially slipped into middle age.

Paper rounds then were effectively child slave labour (and I would imagine that the position has not improved greatly in the intervening years) and lugging hundreds of papers around in two bags over both shoulders was tantamount to child abuse but in those days children did not have the luxury of getting on the blower to Esther Rantzen.   Things took a drastic turn for the better though when the Poison Dwarf decided to quit his Sunday morning paper round at Tasic’s newsagents on Shell Corner and he bequeathed the round to me.    The round was seemingly so well paid that the Dwarf used to deliver the newspapers in his car, him being seventeen and all, and I wondered how this could be so but soon enough all was revealed.  

 

The shop that was formerly Tasics

The pay for the paper round was the going-rate pittance but the key to its profitability was the fact that you had to collect the money for the papers plus the delivery fee off the punters as you walked the streets of your round.   Some customers were happy to rise early and pay you in person once your knuckles had rapped their front doors but others preferred a lie in and would leave the monies for their papers in hidden, secretive nooks and crannies such as under a welcome mat or in a plant pot in the porch.  

At the end of the run through of the round the Poison Dwarf had a pocket bulging with the change that he had collected from the customers and he explained that Tasic never counted the loot but simply slung it in the till.  So the Dwarf advised me to continue with his practice of relieving the pile of coins of all the gold nuggets and also of the fifty pence pieces in an effort to supplement the meagre wages.   This practice yielded such a fruitful return that the overall remuneration for the round was such that eventually I sub-contracted half of it out to my friend Scouse Stuey (who had a touch of the James Dean’s about him).   I didn’t have a great deal of guilt about outwitting Tasic out of a few pennies as the Polish newsagent was unscrupulous enough himself to sell a match and a fag combo to underage smokers and besides I was a street kid from Shell Corner with a living to hustle.

The Dwarf also counselled me to get to the shop no later than 0630 hours to start the round as at that time Tasic had not packed the paper bags so you could do it yourself; Tasic was happy with this as it saved him a job but the benefit of self-packing, continued the Dwarf, was that while Tasic was not looking you could slip a few top shelf magazines into the bag and flog them at school to make a few extra bob, which was a good little side-line.  Things went awry on this front one Sunday though when I had sneaked a copy of Razzle between the pages of a Sunday Mercury and subsequently forgot about the matter.  I unwittingly put the Mercury through the letterbox of an old man who paid exclusively in pennies, which he left in a pot in the porch; his front door was primarily made of glass and as the Mercury hit the ground on the other side of the door to my horror the Razzle slid out of the newspaper and came to rest besides it.  I could hardly knock on the door and ask for the magazine back so I chose to just let sleeping dogs lie.  Luckily for me there was no complaint to the shop and the old fella must have simply thought that the Sunday supplement was unusually racy that week.

James Dean

One bloke always answered the door in a highly dishevelled state after having seen off a gallon of beer the night before and it was clear that each week my knock on the door had interrupted his restorative slumber; he always answered the door in tight red briefs and if I was lucky he had hastily thrown a garment on his potbellied upper body but more often than not he went bare chested.  He would rifle through his wife’s purse (after shouting to her up the stairs “where’s thee puss?”) for sufficient coins to settle his bill while loudly imploring his kids to stop playing on the Stannah stair lift behind him, which they used as a fairground ride.  I suggested to the bloke that he could simply put the monies under the doormat next week to save him having to arise from his pit but he always decided against this option, offering apologies and promising that he would be up in good time next Sunday.  This of course is the classic drinker’s deluded belief that everything will change for the better and be different tomorrow, but of course it never is.

The last drop of my deliveries was to an elderly gentleman named Horace, who was a disabled wheelchair user and I had to knock on his kitchen door which was accessed via his garage.  The garage housed an immaculate Ford Granada in metallic gold and every week I checked the mileage but it never increased and I wondered why Horace didn’t flog it off as it would have fetched a few quid but maybe he secretly harboured a thought that one day he might drive again but sadly that was never going to happen. 

I would always tap on Horace’s kitchen door but more often than not he failed to respond.  Through the frosted glass I could see Horace sitting motionless in his wheelchair and I always feared that he might have given up the ghost and shaken off his mortal coil.  When banging harder on the door reaped no dividends I would gingerly enter the kitchen, which would always smell like death, and place a hand tentatively on Horace’s shoulder whence to my eternal relief he would wake with a start before coming to the realisation that it was only me and there was nothing to worry about.   Old H would then put the kettle on and he would always offer me a two fingered Kit Kat (which made a pleasant change from a two fingered salute) and we would chat about Saturday’s football results for half an hour or so, which he seemed to appreciate given that he lived alone and seemed housebound.

 

A metallic gold Ford Granada 

I was earning more on a Sunday morning than other kids at school who did a morning, evening and Sunday paper round but eventually the halcyon days of the scams came to an end after Tasic sold the shop to an Irish couple named Sean and Mary, who introduced a record book to keep track of the money I collected.   Sean never failed to be cheery, even before dawn on cold mornings and Mary never failed to be miserable, even when Sean tried to draw a smile out of her with his wisecracking blarney.  By employing creative accounting I managed to retain a cut of the collection monies for a while but eventually I realised that the game was up after increasingly rigorous audits by Sean were introduced so with a heavy heart I packed in the round as the reduced income was making my position untenable.

On my final Sunday I told Horace that I would not be visiting anymore and I introduced him to the new paperboy and although he seemed to take it well enough I could tell that underneath he was wistful and forlorn that our little Sunday morning chats were coming to an end and in all honesty so was I, as I enjoyed and looked forward to them.   As I was about to go Horace said, “follow me” and beckoned me into his front room and there to my surprise and delight I found a magnificent fully working train set that filled the whole of the room and Horace let me play with it for a while.  Eventually I departed with a fond farewell, leaving behind Horace, the red pants man, Sean and Mary and it was full steam ahead into my next dubious career.

© Dominic Horton, April 2014.

* EMAIL: lordhofr@gmail.com.

* Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall.