Work

Mum about to mount her pony, although it normally pulled a small trap. I hadn't realised what a good view we had from the back of our house.
I stayed on at school, in the Lower Sixth but it all seemed a bit pointless. I’d no idea where I should be going, and the syllabus was totally irrelevant. John, our next-door-neighbour offered me a job. He ran a secondhand furniture shop, and I’d worked there on Saturdays for several years. That money had helped me go on those marvellous school holidays organised by Dr Ernst Wangerman, our history teacher, who was Austrian.

John wanted me to work in the shop. He had great plans for expansion, and probably regarded me as his substitute son. He and his wife Elsie had no children, and although he was a taciturn man not given to emotion we had a close relationship, stretching back over most of my life. He offered me £20 a week, an unheard of sum in those days. He came to see my parents, and we talked it through. My parents advised against such a step, saying that I needed a job with a pension! I was not yet 18, and the idea of a pension seemed a far-off dream, but I would not have crossed my parents.

This cowboy suit was to be my pride and joy. Unfortunately it was far too small so I split the trousers in half just after the photo was taken on Xmas morning.
Against my own judgement I turned him down, but used his offer as the catalyst to leave school. My first job was as a scientific instrument technician at St Mary’s Hospital, Colchester. It was stupid job, and I lasted three months before applying to Severalls Hospital, a large mental institution, as a medical laboratory technician. This was a job I loved, but it paid just £4 a week, even when I left three years later it was still only £7, and my first week in the Metropolitan Police paid me £13. Still a long way from John’s £20 offer, and he went on to build one of the most successful stores in East Anglia, eventually handing over to his nephew, a strange man, for whom John had little affection.

Christmas 1963 saw me with a girlfriend, Dinah. She worked in the pharmacy at Severalls and we seemed to be going out together. I was never quite sure why that was happening, but she was a nice girl (no sex in those days), and I was, as always, content to jog along. That Christmas her mother bought me a set of towels. A strange present for a young man, but the message she’d written on the card with the present was mind-blowing. ‘Happy Xmas,’ she wrote, ‘these will come in useful for your bottom drawer’. Hold on a moment! I suddenly realised that my life was being mapped out for me.

And I now complain about policemen looking young!

As a direct result of that present on 24 February 1964 I found myself at Peel House, Victoria, London on my first day as a Metropolitan Police Constable. It was the only way I could think of to get me out of the rut I was falling into.