Chapter 1

My adventure started in a most innocent way, with me being asked, along with others at the High School, to help out with the Christmas post deliveries. We selectees were all in the top group in class results, so getting this opportunity was a sort of reward for performing well at school. This was exciting for me, my first paid job, albeit in a temporary capacity. It would give me some idea of what the world of work was like, compared to the sheltered routine of school work.

I was just seventeen, and in my last year of secondary school. My name is Robert McIntyre, and I had one younger brother but no sisters. Girls were still mostly a mystery to me, I have to admit; I was short of hands-on experience, being somewhat shy. At school I paid attention to my studies, and was usually one of the top group in any subject; perhaps not so good at Latin, but passable, for most modern languages have a Latin origin for many words.

We had just experienced the end of term Scottish examinations, so we had a week or two of relaxation after the stress of exams. The opportunity to learn something about the world of work was exciting in itself, and getting paid as well was a bonus. My father was an engineer working in a shipyard, so we were not well off, but capable of living reasonably without staring at poverty. The amount I would earn as a temp postie would help.

We senior pupils were allocated work at several Post Office sorting centres in and around Greenock, population 70,000, on the river Clyde. Greenock was noted then for its shipbuilding yards, engineering works building marine power plants, dry docks for ship repair, and several major sugar refineries. Sugar arrived in bulk carriers by sea, and delivered to my local one, the Westburn refinery, by the lorry-load covered with a tarpaulin. Kids, me among them at times, would have fun picking up raw sugar spilled on Lyndoch Street from small gaps in the lorry’s rear flap; dry weather only. It tasted very strong; different from the final product.

This was before IBM built a factory in Spango Valley, west of the burgh. It was still the era of old industries like sugar refining.

One of these refineries, the Westburn, was at the top of the town, where it had a good water supply from a dam in the hills, led down to the refinery by a seven mile long and five foot wide engineered aqueduct called The Cut, that winds round the hill, gradually dropping in height as it followed the contours, conveying the water at a steady and slow speed to cotton and sugar mills that needed lots of water for their manufacturing processes.

The sugar refinery was the last of these water destinations. By the time the water had passed through the refinery it was brown and hot from the extracted impurities after turning brown sugar into white sugar. It also smelled strongly of hot sugar from its exit for the next half mile or so. You could sniff it from the nearby road when the breeze wafted the aroma that way.

I found I was allocated to the postal centre at Gourock, a seaside resort down river a few miles, so I had to transport myself several miles downriver. There was a railway line, and also a bus route.

At this date, the year 1961, the cheapest way to get from Greenock to Gourock at 6.30 am was by the workers bus that ran to Gourock from near the town square in Greenock. The rail line was also a possible, but the train timetable did not fit my work timetable, and the train fare was greater as well.

The bus was busy; I had no idea where all these men were going – it was almost all men. My bus stop in Gourock was only a few hundred yards from the Postal Sorting Office, so that was fine.

My first day was a training day; seeing how the sorting was done, and learning where my route would be. I was told I would get a lift by a delivery van as far as the start of my first road. Several of us temps shared at the back of the van, each to be dropped off as appropriate so no time was wasted walking to the start point. I watched the men sorting the mail, and was astonished at how fast they managed it. They seemed to just glance at the street name and toss the item into the correct pigeon hole in a vast array of these boxes, one after the other in a constant stream. This was the era before postcodes were introduced, allowing machine sorting to speed up the process, but at the time the manual effort looked amazingly fast.

Later in the day I went out with a regular postman to learn his delivery techniques at a practical level: how to ensure that all the items – mostly Christmas cards – got through a letter box with none left sticking out, as some vandal supposedly might pull them back out. Houses with vestibules but no letter box were different; with you swinging the door open and dropping the pile of post at the inside door, then pulling the outer door closed before you left. There was a feeling of professional pride in how the posties delivered the mail so that bad weather could not reach the delivered post.

We did two deliveries each day; sometimes to the same street, but often to a different route if one of the post staff was off ill or otherwise unable to cope. One longer route got split in two and two of us temps did it, with one heavy bag of mail each; it was that intensive with the Christmas deliveries. I was later back that day.

The remainder of the training day was taken up with paperwork: reading the postie’s rule book; filling out a form to register myself as a temp, agreeing the rate of pay and accepting the hours of duty. As far as us temps were concerned, there was no evening work, so no overtime and no overtime pay. I reckoned it was the regular staff making sure they got all the overtime and extra pay, but there may have been a concern for the safety of teenagers at night-time, especially having to catch an almost empty bus in the middle of the night.

On my route I queried deliveries to what appeared to be an empty house up a flight of stone steps from the street. The regular man dismissed my concern, saying, “Our job is to deliver, not to question how the owner uses his property. If he is away for a while, that is his business, not yours.”

I accepted this mild rebuke, and delivered to every house that mail was addressed, and that was that; I delivered all that was due to be delivered, except that two days later I could not get anything through the letterbox; it was stuffed tight. The door was locked with a Yale lock, but I noticed that one corner of the porch had sagged due to some of the supporting slabs having slipped to one side where the slope dropped away from the porch. As a result the corner of the porch had tilted to the side, and the lock no longer engaged fully. Wanting to correctly deliver the mail, I tried the door, and with a creak as the woodwork moved some more, the lock disengaged, allowing the door to open.

I pushed at the door, and it moved with difficulty because there was a deep heap of mail heaped up behind it. I squeezed myself inside, so that I could clear the blockage by moving the pile further back and give me a chance to clear the clogged letterbox.

I managed to get this done, and as I turned to exit I noticed that the inside door had two doorknobs instead of one.

‘Odd’, I thought, but time was short, for each round was carefully judged so that you would meet another post van at the end of your route. Be too late and you would miss your transport and have to walk back to the sorting office and suffer a complaint by the supervisor about wasting time. So I left, smartish, and got on with the rest of the route. Thinking about what I had done to improve things, I realised I had overstepped the boundary of acceptability, so I said nothing about that house and how I had made it easier to deliver the post. I hoped that local kids didn’t try to get inside for what they regarded as fun. Fortunately this street was one of houses inhabited by the better-off section of the community, so less liable to interference by what we would regard as vandals. In later years I came to realise that well-off children can be just as damaging to property as those from more deprived backgrounds, but this was now and my conclusions were based on my own family background of responsibility towards the neighbourhood.

Two days later, I found myself ahead of schedule after a drop-off in material for delivery. It was amazing how much things speeded up if every third or fourth house had no delivery that day.

So when I got to that apparently empty house I made a point of ringing the doorbell in hopes of someone being there to whom I could point out the sagging corner of the porch as a concerned citizen, or something in that line. No-one answered, so I pushed the door open again and after dropping the two items of junk mail on the floor, I stepped over to the interior door to look at the odd pair of doorknobs.

Having a chance to look properly at the door, it occurred to me that it was not an opening door at all, but just had the general appearance of a door. There was no keyhole, and at the other side of the door I could see no sign of where hinges would be expected. The door, or wall, was solid, without any glass pane that you would expect on an inside door so that from the interior you could see if someone was standing there.

I returned my gaze to the two circular knobs, each about an inch and a half across, and looking perfectly normal for a door; or rather for a door with one doorknob. These handles were uncoloured, just varnished wood, but above each was a rectangular panel, roughly two inches long by an inch high of what appeared to be glass or perspex. Both were dark, not showing anything, not that one would expect them to show anything other than the house-owner’s name.

Then I spotted something funny about the doorknobs: round the circumference, but on the background surface, was a sequence of markings such as you find on a cooker to tell you what temperature it is set for. This lot of markings had no numbers for temperature or anything else. It was as if the markings were pure decoration.

Puzzling, and my spare time was almost gone. The heap of delivered post remained untouched. It must represent many months, but more probably years, because it all seemed to be junk mail; nothing personal. No letters, birthday or Christmas cards; no sign of bills from the bank, or from the water or electric or gas utilities, not even from the phone provider. Did the owner not have the house connected to these utilities? Nothing?

It made me wonder what sort of house this was. If it didn’t have connections for water or sewage, or any power supply, or even a telephone, what the heck was the building used for?

With these questions befuddling my brain, I left and continued with my delivery round. As each day got closer to Christmas, I was finding that the occasional householder would offer me some silver coins as a Christmas gift. This surprised me, but I knew not to refuse the gesture. But why would a family give a financial gift to a temporary postman? Even more so, to a teenage schoolboy? When I got back to the sorting office, I asked about this anomaly and was told that such gratuities were a thank-you for a year’s service. When I pointed out that I had only being working for a few days, one of my postie friends told me just to keep it as a bonus.

“No-one has given you a large amount, have they?” he questioned.

“No; it is small amounts, but I didn’t expect anything at all!”

“Then be happy that you are being appreciated. The regular postie may get his own thank-you later.”

I left it at that. Only a few householders contributed, and the total was not substantial so I didn’t feel that I was taking something away from the regular postman. I was also paid by the week, so I was happy to collect my pay packet from the boss at the end of the first week. I had even been reimbursed for my bus fares, I was pleased to note. I thought it was coming out of my own pocket, but the postal authorities made the decision about where I would work, so they saw the need to make sure I was not out of pocket by going where they wanted me to work.

I was getting to know all the idiosyncrasies of my round; which homes were up a set of stairs round the back of the building; which houses had no letterbox – I was told that by law every house was supposed to have a letterbox, but not all houses had been provided with this essential tool.

Then there were the varying designs of letterboxes; not the boxes as such, but the flaps. Some were outside and you had to lift them to place the mail in the hole; some were inside, and a few had strong springs holding the flap closed against windy weather. This was a damn nuisance, for the flap acted as a man-trap trying to damage your fingers if you reached too far inside. You had to recognise the ‘biters’ and use a finger to push the flap open enough for your need, and then slip the post in before escaping unscathed, with a bit of luck. Some had lost their pressure spring, and these were a dream for deliveries.

Some letterboxes had a catcher behind them, to collect the mail in a wire-framed bucket. These were fine if they were cleared daily, but if the owner was away for the holidays, the catcher quickly filled up and you were facing the clogged letterbox syndrome again. Sometimes the catcher would detach due to the pressure as more mail came in, and was added to by the weight of the contents. In these cases the catcher bucket often popped off and freed the box for new mail deliveries.

Where there was no catcher frame, the mail fanned out over the floor, and you could tell at a glance through the box when the family had been absent for a few days. Deliveries were another indicator of the size of the household. A family with children got the most, as the children would be getting cards from their friends, whereas a single person or a couple on their own got significantly fewer postal items. It was clear that some of these people used mail order, as catalogues featured strongly in their mail.

Talking about catalogues, the vans were used to deliver parcels, and these exploded in number prior to Christmas. It was a special run with parcels: driver and delivery person. The temp got the job of taking the parcel from the driver, running to the door and ringing the doorbell so that you could hand in the parcel and scarper back to the van, where the driver had the next one ready. You certainly got your exercise with that task, and there were no handouts from the house for delivering parcels. Most parcels were bringing Christmas presents from afar so not regarded as part of the regular service, unless you had stuff coming from a mail order house, and that was also not seen as worthy of a gratuity.