The
Seadog's Magic Winkle – Part 2
By
Dominic Horton
Last
week in episode 78 I illuminated you about the secret, inner life of
working in a petrol station (called PMG Forecourts) in the West
Midlands when I was a teenager in the 1980's. This week the story
continues...............
In
addition to the full-time employees of the Seadog, Ashers and me
there was a veritable army of part-time staff as at least two people
were needed to man operations and the Seadog didn't work evenings,
Saturday afternoons or Sundays. I met Hugh Queensbury,
Still-in-Fjord, Alexander Sutcliffe and Dustin Scoffman at PMG as
they all worked as part-timers and they have remained as close
cronies of mine ever since. The best friendships are formed in
adversity, or so they say.
 |
| Eek, now a senior analyst on Russia & the former Soviet Union |
Another
lad worked there called Eek but I didn't work with him much and he
kept his distance from our social group, which was a wise move on his
part and served him well, as free from our frivolity he later went on
to greatness, becoming Russian correspondent for the BBC, whereas the
rest of us have ended up as average Joes (or in my case sub-average.)
The
main skill needed to be a forecourt cashier or assistant was to have
the ability to fend off boredom, which would creep upon you from
every angle and engulf you if one was not vigilant enough. When I
was on the till and accompanied by a part-timer I was effectively in
charge so between the two of us we had free rein to undertake things
to entertain ourselves, which we especially needed to do in the
evenings as after rush hour there was only a sporadic trickle of
customers. Spending vacuous hours having to amuse ourselves in the
confines of the shop felt like association time in prison, except we
were actually getting paid for it.
Some
of our preferred activities in the evenings were watching television
on an old black and white portable set, playing cards or dice cricket
(or actual cricket on the forecourt in the summer) or playing the
tedious Cliff, Elvis and Beatles game, which consisted of us
listening to The Cliff, Elvis and Beatles Show on
Beacon Radio and trying to guess which of the three legendary artists
would be singing the next track.
 |
| Benny Hill as Dickie Davies by request of Toby In-Tents |
One
of the duties of the part-timers was to clean the male, female and
disabled toilets. Cleaning the disabled toilet was impossible as it
was cleverly disguised as a store room and was crammed full of stock.
A customer once caused a mini crisis as he actually asked to use
the disabled toilet, which was unprecedented, but he was quite
insistent telling us about his rights etc. We had to clear a gangway
to the karsi by clearing out a load of gardening products that
deterred pests, such as Cat Off and
Slug Off but the
customer got fed up waiting and ironically he bogged off.
I
suspected that some of the part-timers used to sneak pornographic
magazines into the toilets and read them leaning on their mop until
they were interrupted by a customer, whence they would hide the
literature with great haste in the same way that Benny Hill did when
the camera fell on him and he was doing his impersonation of Dickie
Davies in World of Sport mode.
I
thought about the aforementioned a few years ago when visiting an
award winning public lavatory in the Somerset town of Clevedon. The
ageing attendant not only took great pride in keeping the
conveniences spotlessly clean but he also put relatively tasteful
soft porn pictures on the walls of the Gents so men could enjoy them
whilst having a pee in the urinals. If I were a betting man I would
hazard a guess that if I visited Clevedon today that the titillating
pictures in the Gents have been taken down by order of the killjoy
Council and that the toilets are now a sh*thole (literally) on
account of the attendant having to man three dozen municipal toilets
in the area due to local authority cutbacks.
 |
| Scoffers, enjoying his retirement from deathball |
Anyway,
a customer named Brendan would have thought all of his Christmases
had come at once if he had walked into the PMG toilets and been
greeted by the sight of mop wielding youth. Brendan was in his 60's
and was an odd character with strange rust coloured hair, a walking
stick and a stiff neck. Brendan rarely bought petrol, or anything
else for that matter, but he used to wander into the forecourt shop
for a chat, accompanied by a small, yappy dog. Brendan had a vague
family connection with the Seadog's wife Pat so even though he was a
nuisance we had to humour him and we couldn't simply insist that he
leave the shop.
When
I joined PMG the Seadog warned me that Brendan was a predatory
pervert and if he was given half a chance he would strike, so under
no circumstances was he to be invited behind the counter or into the
room beyond, which was out of sight of the shop. The Seadog
explained that the last time Brendan had got behind the counter he
had used his stick and canine companion to corral a member of staff
named Pete Shotton into the oil cupboard, in a One Man and
His Dog style manoeuvre, and
turned the key in the door, locking poor Shotton in with him in the
confined room. When the Seadog became aware of the commotion he
rushed to the oil cupboard. When he unlocked the door he found
bottles of Castrol GTX all over the place and that Shotton was
trembling violently and had gone as white as a sheet, a pallor that
he has retained to this day. Brendan once touched my arm so I
threatened him and after that fortunately he left me alone.
I
used to work with Scoffman on Tuesday evenings and for some reason he
was initially wary of me and he used to sit in the back room on his
own, so sitting at at the till I used to pass the time by reading
vociferously and it was then that I first read one of the books I
cherish most, On The Road by
Jack Kerouac. In the pacey book Kerouac breathlessly chronicles his
exciting adventures travelling the breadth and length of America with
Neal Cassady and others encountering drugs, bepop jazz and the
hippest people; the irony was not lost of me that I was sitting
motionless on my back side in a dreary petrol station in the West
Midlands in an occupation that was on the extreme margins of
sedentariness, which if documented by me would have been entitled On
My Arse.
Eventually
I won Scoffman over with my charms and he warmed to me and we quickly
became good friends. I used to look forward to my Tuesday shift more
than any other as Scoffers and I invented an electrifying game that
was like a vicious version of baseball, which we called deathball.
We used to play the game in the shop and the aim of the batsman was
to knock stock off the shelves to score points, each stock item
having an allocated points total. The ball was a tightly packaged
amount of paper wrapped in several layers of electrical tape, so it
was a ferocious little projectile and as the pitcher stood only a few
yards away from the batsman the game was fraught with danger for the
pitcher. The most points were scored by knocking packets of fags off
the cigarette stand but as this was behind the pitcher's head one
often saw the ball flying at one's face from only a few feet away.
Afraid that one of us would lose an eye safety measures were
introduced and therein-after the pitcher had to put a small wicker
basket over his face, which provided the required protection but
still allowed enough vision to see the batsman.
Professional
footballers often eulogise about the euphoric feeling when they score
a goal but there was no greater sporting adrenaline rush than
catching the deathball sweetly on the meat of the bat to see it go
hurtling over the pitcher's wicker safety mask and crash into the
cigarette stand, sending half a dozen packets of Embassy No 6 flying
around the shop. When Embassy decided to discontinue making No 6 a
punter came into the shop and asked to buy our entire stock of the
product but we had less packets of the cigarettes than was recorded
on the stock ledger due to a fiddle we had going on, which was one of
many. But more of that and other forecourt frolics next time as I am
sure that I have filled you up with enough tomfoolery to keep your
motor running for another week.
©
Dominic Horton, July 2014.
*
EMAIL: lordhofr@gmail.com.
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