How to make a complete dog’s dinner of a summer job
Here’s a true story. When I was 18, I was a carefree English degree student, studying at the dreaming spires of Sunderland Polytechnic.
I would travel home to beautiful East Hampshire to spend the holidays with ma and pa. My first priority would always be to get a holiday job in order to earn my keep over the holidays and to earn some beer money for when I returned.
Some bright spark had just started a new company called Instant Muscle which preyed on people like me.
An office would take calls from people wanting work done and they’d hire me out for £5 an hour. £3.50 of this would go to me, the remainder to the agency.
Over the course of one summer, I painted fences in a slaughterhouse, dismantled several coal-bunkers, helped people pack their belongings before moving house, built a crazy paving path for an old lady and was almost seduced by a vicar.
One particular morning I got a call from Instant Muscle, telling me to go to this address in Godalming, a really posh place in Surrey, home of Charterhouse School where Genesis went and home to Channel 5’s Matthew Wright.
A lady there, I was told, needed help emptying her cellar after her husband, some army major type, had died.
Sounds promising, I remember thinking, expecting a nice bottle of wine out of it.
The people who hired me were a funny bunch. Some treated me like a skivvy while others, obviously embarrassed by the paltry wages I was paid, would force gifts on me. I wasn’t allowed to accept extra cash or to negotiate my own terms when I got there, but the agency would turn a blind eye to the occasional crate of beer, box of bourbons or, in one case, a battered Vespa scooter.
I arrived at the address of the job and found it to be a splendid Georgian mansion with a half-mile-long drive and one of those gravel turning circles at the top.
The frontage was impressive with ivy growing up the walls and a couple of urns with exotic plants growing either side of the thick oak doors.
The grounds were impressive too. They stretched as far as the eye could see, landscaped by Calamity Jones in all probability, with a pond in the far distance. It made Windsor Castle’s gardens look like my uncle’s scutty allotment.
It was the sort of place that would be used as a location for Brideshead Revisited.
While I was taking in the sheer opulent splendour of the place I became aware of a distant noise. I initially thought it was thunder or the thud of hooves on manicured turf.
I was then drawn to the sight of steam rising from the direction of the pond.
Goodness me, it’s the son of the Loch Ness monster’s brother’s minder.
I’d studied the concept of fight or flight during my A-Level psychology course and knew that there’s only a split second in which you make the choice of whether to stand your ground or run like Zola Budd.
This was distracting me as I watched the cloud of steam getting closer to me.
I’m not sure when I realised it was a dog, maybe when it was about 500 yards away and I could hear its bark.
I’m always intrigued as to how dogs can run and bark at the same time. Try it yourself, it’s not easy.
When this hell hound was 300 yards away I began to get twitchy and started to look for a tree to climb.
It wasn’t just a dog, it was a Rhodesian Ridgeback, probably bred by Eugene Terre Blanche, and it looked as mad as hell.
It saw me and thought “dinner”.
At that moment, the lady of the house, an octogenarian Miss Marples type, opened a sash window, poked her leathery head out and shouted: “Don’t be scared, just kick his balls.”
As the Ridgeback reached me, I drew back my leg and gave it the full benefit of my Instant Muscle steel toe-cappers square in the nuts which, I must admit, did stop it in its tracks. I thought I’d broken my toe.
As the hound limped off whimpering and puking, I heard Miss Marple shriek: “No! I meant kick his footballs which are on the gravel. He loves that.”
Needless to say, I never got the bottle of wine.
