Comedy And Error by Simon Day

Author:Simon Day [Day, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847378507
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter Eleven

At some point in the eighties Rupert Moy gave me a job working for his landscape-gardening firm. I took home £150 a week and in the summer it seemed like the best job in the world. The worst thing about my previous varied casual employment had been having to deal with all the other people I worked with: the carriage-clock men, people who got upset if I hung my coat on their peg or put the broom in the wrong place; they seemed to know I was passing through and was a waste of their time. I did meet some good people, mainly in the building game, people who loved life and wanted a laugh, but not many kindred spirits. But now I was working with one of my best mates, among friends.

Back at school Rupert and I had initially been drawn together by our shared disdain of being middle class. I remember clearly us both staggering home from Thomas Tallis and him saying to me, ‘Just because your dad talks posh it doesn’t mean you’re posh yourself, does it?’

‘No way,’ I’d replied, delighted to have met my soulmate.

With a name like Rupert it had been hard for him to get any rep going at school. I think that’s why he’d always been keen to highlight his fighting skills, which were maybe born partly of his frustration with being quite well-off; he reached puberty early, too, which gave him an advantage. When we left school and hung about together we started picking up working-class attributes: we wore donkey jackets and Fred Perrys and dropped our Hs. He got a job back then in the parks for Greenwich Council as well, so became officially working class. We’d go to the pub at six sharp and play pool, intent on beating each other: we were very competitive over the green baize and also with girls, though he beat me hands down most of the time there. The Sun would be rolled up and slapped on the knee during conversation as we drank light ales and smoked ten Bensons in the bookies’, pontificating over Pat Eddery and Steve Cauthen’s latest mounts. We watched the boxing obsessively and he became a devoted West Ham fan. We adopted choice slang words, sneered at posh people and generally kept it real as much as we could.

Now, with the gardening, I once again didn’t display a great deal of aptitude – I never learnt the names of any flowers or how to do tree maintenance – but it was cosy driving round Blackheath and Greenwich and obviously I got to meet people in their gardens, which was good because I’ve always made a study of the human race. In fact I suppose none of my time in the doldrums was completely wasted because I was forever watching people, picking up mannerisms and character traits.

I still do this, of course, but it’s not as easy. Money, with its taxi cabs and nice houses in good areas, can

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.