More Temp accountant

At some time during all this – my memory of dates is hazy, a bit like when I did History at school – I had a temp job at Honeywell in Brentford. My first experience was parking in Church Walk, because as a new Temp I didn’t know if I was allowed to use the car park. A man came running out of his front door and remarked he would end in jail if he catches anyone else parking outside his house. I took that as a threat, and decided that discretion was the best part of valour and moved my car 15 yards down the road.

This must have been 1978 because one of my new colleagues had decided he was going to make a fortune by creating T shirts and banners celebrating Scotland’s success in Argentina at the World Cup. He invested heavily in this merchandise despite being not Scottish and appearing to be a shrewd businessman. It didn’t end well. Ally’s Army who had got to the finals when England didn’t, Englishers were shocked and devastated and Scotland were expected to do well. Particularly by their manager Ally MacLeod. As it turned out, they were humiliated. It could have been different, as When Saturday Comes observes: “in an alternate universe, Masson scores his penalty, Scotland win the match and go out of the competition honourably in the second stage”. In that alternative reality our Liam Robinson (for it was he) would not have been financially spatchcocked, not be forgotten by everybody except me, and might have ridden his success to become the next Alan Sugar or Donald Trump. Or probably not.

This is Liam when Scotland were out

Honeywell was a good gig for a temp accountant. It was a prosperous time for computing business and there were quite a lot of temps around, and good company. I began lasting relationships with local pubs in Brentford where we congregated – the Kings Arms, the Griffin, The Globe, The Magpie and Crown (always referred to as the Three Pigeons) etc. I also started my relationship with both the town – which has blossomed to this day - and the employer where it turned out I stayed for about 25 years.

But I was busy going through my apprenticeship as a trainee hippie and I moved on from Honeywell in September, because I was heading with my girlfriend Kathie to take part in the Vendange in France – the harvest of wine grapes. This involved trains to Blackheath and hanging around for several hours awaiting a lift to Dover. We were heading for Beaune, a journey that took about 3 days via short lifts, nights in camp sites, one in a field. It is also surprisingly cold in mid France in September, even ice at night. Lifts came from farm trucks and were more feasible if I hid behind a tree until they stopped for Kathie. Finally we got a long lift from some proper hippies in a 2CV Citroen. Memories.

Arriving in Beaune we found a camp site and a Morris Minor van containing 2 couples from Burton on Trent. They called each other (and everybody else of any nationality) me duck. They were nice people, kind and generous, and genuinely poor. We were poor too, in a way, but when things got bad I had a credit card and could get some funds from a bank. The vendange happens when the wine people decide the grapes are ready, and that year it was late. We had registered at the Job Centre, known then as the ANPE, and eventually when we visited they had some jobs to dole out. In the meantime, we spent a lot of time in the campsite, and some evenings in the Arms Park Bar in the town centre, where there was usually a fight at some point (not me, officer). That aside, Beaune was surprisingly dull, especially for young people with little funds.

After a week or two the work started. The first employer was posh. They had a small chateau in the town, provided rather grand accommodation and excellent food and wine. At the end there was a ‘tip’ of a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet which I see now starts at £52 per bottle. But after that we were back on the dole. Another chateau employed us but that was a different story entirely. Nasty employer who didn’t trust anybody. Thought we were stealing secateurs (obviously we craved them) the food was poor and the work was hard. By this time I had got myself converted into a porter: I carried a huge bucket on my back and transported it to the truck and tipped it in. Better for me than being down almost on the ground chopping off bunches of grapes.

One of the things you learn in a vendange (in Burgundy at least) is that vast fields of vines are not as they appear. You are transported in a truck or van a couple of miles out to, say, Pommard and deposited at the top of a hill. There are 50 or 100 lines of vines and you think “Blimey, we’ll be here all day” but then the foreman says ‘our’ rows are 6,7 and 8 and we should only do those few vines. After an hour or two, we’re finished there and the van takes us off somewhere else. Maybe it’s a neighbouring field, or maybe we’re off to Chorey-les-Beaune 4 miles away on the other side of Beaune. Good fellowship, wine to keep us going and a very French picnic, but when we get back in the evening it’s eat a lovely dinner (in the first place, a nasty stew in the second) then we are all quite worn out and go to bed at 9.30.

We became friendly with some guys from North Africa. We had decent rooms and of course there was no racism in France in the 1970s, obviously. They invited us for dinner at their gaff. When we got there it was a room with perhaps 40 bunks on 3 levels. Our friends welcomed us with a lump of lamb and a variety of vegetables. They gave them to Kathie (whose profession was as a cook and more importantly had the required qualification – she was female) and encouraged her to get on with cooking. She did and it was a decent dins but not at the standard we were used to in Beaune.

These Africans were mainly from Algeria, but also Morocco, Tunisia and places that I had never really heard of like Senegal and Mauritania. For about 2 days I could write my name and say good morning in Arabic. Well that’s what they told me I was saying. I may have been saying “I’m a fat gammon-coloured donkey” – who knows?

The work ran out in Beaune, and our African chums and our Burton amigos were deciding whether to stay down south and wait for the carrots or go up to Alsace for more grapes. They were really professional itinerary farm workers. We were amateurs having a sort of holiday and were planning to go home to normal jobs. We decided we could take another week in Alsace, which is anyway on the way home. A train to Colmar (no – I had never heard of it) and a night on the platform. Vans with vine growers appeared in the morning and our host was M Frick. (yes, you pronounce it as you might imagine). I remember most things in Ammerschwihr, where we ended up, were called Frick though my memory may have failed me. It was quite a freaky place, and very different to Beaune.

These people were poor farmers, the accommodation and the food were very basic. Transport was on a trailer behind a tractor. It was now well into October and we were several hundred miles North of Beaune. The good news is we started work at I think about 7am but at 9 they came around with sausage and brandy. That warmed me up and I survived the day. There was a mix of fit young people (not including me, though I was young and a people) and local peasants. I remember a couple who were at least in their 70s (tell me about it) but of course they got through the work twice as fast as us young ones.

It was Ok and certainly an experience, but by now I had had enough and the pair of us went home. My next job was out in Stanwell, working for a rather horrible transport company. I didn’t like the owners nor my boss the finance director. It was disorganised and they were in financial meltdown having lost their main customer. I remember little, except I didn’t like it and I didn’t stay long, probably mutual lack of faith. Then I get a job with Stratstone, then a British Leyland dealer in Willesden but with a speciality in the ‘posh’ brands: at that time called JRT – Jaguar Rover Triumph. The financial director was leaving soon because he had bought a Land Rover and a revolver and was taking his family overland to India. This was before the revolution, Russian invasion, the Anglo- American invasion , the Mujahideen and the Taliban, but it was always thought of as a dangerous place with bandits. My mate Ken went to India overland through Afghanistan a little earlier by bus etc and I remember his companion Nobby spending all his money on an Afghani Rug which never appeared in the Wirral. I wonder why?

Stratstone was fine. Not very taxing and I remember doing the wages. Driving or being driven in usually a Triumph TR7 to the local Nat West to take out the lolly, despite the bank being a few hundred yards away. We had to go in twos because evil types lurked having worked out that companies like Stratstone took their wages out of the bank on Thursdays and the wages had been repatrited from the Stratstone people at least once before. Stratstone is now I think a block of flats and the bank looks like it’s an estate agent. I imagine very few now take their pay in banknotes and coins and no jobs for those of us who split them up into pay packets. I remember we couldn’t use a £20 note because nobody would accept one, and one man wouldn’t accept a tenner either. The rest of my job was to do with warranty claims, making them and trying to get the manufacturer to pay up.

I was coming up to a career change soon, so that’ll do for this chapter.