Fessing up continued
In the late winter of 1974 I got a job with National Car Parks Special Events Division. A firm that had made money by getting hold of bomb sites just after the war and turning them into car-parks. People were told don’t look too closely at how they’d got hold of the plots.
The Special Events Division was run from one of the brick-lined arches supporting the railway lines that served Liverpool Street station. My boss was an ex-soldier with early Parkinsons, milky eyes and a clipped moustache. My job, he said, is to go out into the country, right out into the country away from London and make man-size temporary car-parks.
He issued me with a yellow NCP dustcoat with dark blue cuffs and collar and signed over a yellow Transit van and a deep sided trailer. Underneath the arch, right at the back, was a stack of metal rods painted white with a dirty pointed end and a curl at the other to pass string thru. The string was stacked in big white balls halfway up the wall. On the other side of the wall were stacked the awkward to handle folding signs: CAR PARK and EXIT.
The boss introduced me to my platoon the next morning. (We were off to Plumpton Racecourse near Brighton). The men were pensioners, one had lost an arm. Their spokesman was a bright eyed East Ender in battered desert boots who set himself to teach me the wrinkles of the trade. At the last moment a supervisor arrived. I think he may have been called Gordon or Malcolm. He had a Dickensian bald head and ginger side whiskers and those eyes that never open all the way.
The next day, out in the field, the East Ender and the platoon strung out a fake premium entrance. Like a lobster trap. When a posh car nosed off the road they slyly beckoned it over and dropped the string, a gloved hand came out with the bung and in went the lucky customer. At the end of the day those clever old gents had their drinks money for the week.
Was it that first day I was called a fifty-bob a day nutcase by young thugs in a Jaguar? Or was it another fairy tale day? The whole of that springtime was wreathed in smiles as I hovered around England making car-parks on green fields, gyrated in the mist at the West of England Agriculture Show, pushed stakes into bloody tales turf round Chepstow Castle and skipped out of the way of the mud rut maniacs splattering EXIT at Silverstone.
Sometimes we had to stop overnight. I suppose that was when I will have smoked a joint with the supervisor. Like me he had an air of secret disgrace, a cashiered colonel or a defrocked deacon. The old gents could smell it. He would turn to me, after the uncaring cookery of the boarding house supper,
“… off for a drink, freshen up my damage”
I’d jog off with him and on the way back he’d pull out a reefer to tide us over till morning. He turned out to be a Liberal councillor for a north London borough.
One day the boss with the milky eyes told me to go and pick up Eddie who ran the Earl’s Court exhibition centre car park. As I’ve described elsewhere Eddie had the fief as a reward for keeping schtum in prison. The Boat Show was on and he gave me his pass to the exhibition and told me to fool around upstairs for half an hour while he cashed up and handed his hutch over to somebody he didn’t identify.
I went up two flights of concrete stairs and came out into the Great Hall. Straightaway a girl in blue with bare arms came up and gave me a paper sack with a dolphin motif. Glossy coated fibre-glass prows went by overhead. And then all of a sudden (as I told Eddie later) there was old Ted Heath pulling himself up out of a poop not ten foot away. The Prime Minister. It was that year we had two elections. Who rules? He had a smoothie tan and silver hair and a light blue mod-type suit a high ranking Criminal Investigation Department detective might wear. I went back down the back stairs full of it. Eddie shrugged on his coat,
“… off to Kempton then. Not a lunatic behind the wheel I hope?”
About half way thru the NCP tour I got a call from a young woman. She was in television. She bedded me in a flat by Primrose Hill and the next day I walked on down the Hill and an image of her slender white form rose out of the grass. She caught up with me at a restaurant over the railway lines into Euston. Our song played as we ate zabaglione.
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
but if you try sometimes
you get what you need.
When we got back her flatmate had come in from work. I never knew whether he had a thing for her or not. He was a journalist. He was a cherubic looking guy with blondish hair that fell straight down on each side of his face. Cherubic? Easy to say, hard to know — let’s just say he had a roundness of rosy cheek and a fullness of red lip.
Oh yes, I said, perhaps I have a story for you — I know a Liberal Councillor who smokes pot. Martin Walker (for it was he) looked at me the way you learn to do at Oxbridge and I got a new adjective to apply to myself: craven, well not quite craven more anxious to denounce, to buy favour from strength. And I still do it — a dirty, elementary trading in friendship and loyalty vouchers. A compulsion to betray anyone who trusts me with closeness.
The young woman moved up north. I worked out how to disconnect the mileometer and buzzed up in the yellow NCP Transit to court her. We got married the twenty seventh July in Canterbury. My best man drove the Transit back to London with mother lying on a board in the back. She had a spinal problem. Nobody dared speak about my choice but I was happy as Larry as they say. I’d married for love.
