Between leaving school and starting my apprenticeship, I spent the summer grading and packing eggs at a poultry farm. It took 10 years for me to be able to face eating another egg after that…

My first HP buy as a kid was an Abu 7000 which is still in good nick

Not much use for it now, all the fish are gone and most seagulls hang about in the High Street with the down and outs

I was about 11 when my dad took an early retirement from the RAF and decided to build his own house (couldn't afford to buy a decent one) so a couple of years were spent helping out on that project. The most memorable was when he decided that the back of the plot of recovered land was lousy soil and intercepted some lorries that were carting topsoil away from a major project and talked the drivers into dumping it on our land instead of their longer journey. I donlt know how much each lorry load was perhaps 5-10 cu yds? Anyhow some 30+ of those got dumped on our plot and I had the job of shovelling it all level with shovel and barrow – took a while.

The house was in a small village so opportunities for work were few. I earned some pennies hauling a push lawn-mower round and offering my services.. enough to buy the materials for a first canvas kayak whch i later sold and added pennies to for a better second kayak build. I also had a job one summer (14/15 yr old) pruning tomato plants in large greenhouses… a 12 miles cycle ride to get there and the day spent sweating in the hothouses and getting covered in that itchy residue that comes off the leaves.

I suppose I was relatively privilleged that we had a car when many didn't and the family used to go abroad for a few weeks most summer holidays – on the cheap, camping around europe back when there were few camp sites.

I went to uni at 17 and was heavily involved in sports and some holidays involved training and travelling to competitions. We spent one summer (between commitments) working as cleaners which incuded scrubbing the walls and ceilings of the students union gym and scrubbing all the floors of the complex.

I also had one job working on a farm mostly unloading and carting feed or fertilizer bags 25Kg on each shoulder or throwing straw bales up for stacking..very little mechansiation there.

I did do a christmas stint at the London Brick Co…working a stamping machine or shovelling spoil that fell off conveyers – noisy, filthy mindless stuff that left me deaf for an hour or two at the end of every day. Just as well it was only a few weeks. H&S didn't figure much but i did turn down one job there when they wanted me to shovel out the furnaces and had no breathing equipment for the fine dust that kicked up just walking in there. Otherwise I'd have done it despite the bays each side being fired up and temps in the 40+C. between them.

The rest of my Uni career jobs were related to my profession – so seeing practice while dossing down in the cheapest digs i could find because while we had grants in those days the £13 a week term-time I just about managed on dropped to a mere £7 during holiday uni-related stuff. Sometimes i got lucky and the practices i worked with added some pocket-money or let me fill my car on their fuel account. £4.50p for B&B a week didn't leave much for food or fuel. My folks did help out when I got desperate but I hated to ask and did my best without which meant being more frugal than most during term time too.

pgk

That was a great shop. I guess that it closed long ago.

JA

Up to the age of 13, sawing logs and splitting kindling. Demolishing half a cottage. Cutting nettles in the orchard and picking apples up a ladder. 15+ Fly press work, drilling machine and a little lathe work. Electrical work with the maintainance crew during shutdowns in the local factory.

regards Martin

At 16 (1974) having left school and before I started my marine engineering apprenticeship I had a part time job in a carpet warehouse operating a flypress cutting the hole in the corner of carpet samples. The carpet samples were then collated in the right order and the hole through each was used to fasten them together…..

Regards to all

Derek

Bob a Job! Some memories. Did similar for out church youth group, washing cars.

At Christmas time had a a week off school for postal deliuveires. Early starts, sometimes , if lucky was dropped off with three bulging bags. Two years was lucky enough to get my road as part of the "walk", so time for a wee, and cuppa before the Inspector came out in a van with another bag.

One night, on second delivery, at 6 pm found myself sitting on the kerb having to sort all my letters which escaped the office somehow. Can still remember my hand sticking to an iron gate one frosty morning.

Between school and starting Aprenticeship worked in a body shop. Did an awful lot of rubbing down, so had very few finger prints left, by the end. But did get my bike and mudguards painted in a very special colour scheme.

Also, use to borrow Dad's Britool socket set and earn a few quid de-coking or servicing local cars. Cycling home one night, clutching the socket set to the handlebars, the lid came open. Luckily very little traffic to worry me as i crawled along the gutter, looking for the sockets by the light from the lamposts!

Ah, to be young again!

Howard

I was a delivery lad for the local butcher, 5 of us intotal, not bad for a small shop, my round needed a delivery bike with the basket on front, oh. happy days. Also worked in the shop on school holidays.

I also had two paper rounds, morniung and evening covering two areas, I soon cottoned on to using the butcher delivery bike to carry the poapers on the long round.

and for a short while a grocery delivery round, Alan Sugar in the making – don't know what went wrong!!!!!

Started real work at 17 straight from school as an apprentice for BT, and the rest is all history.

Tell the kids today and they don't believe you, (enter Monty Python Yorkshireman sketch).

leave school, go to Uni, expect a management job on 30K+ that they have been promised, oh! the irony

Aye them were days

**LINK**

They were packed so you could pop one in a fitting without taking the box off.

When I was about 14 I desperately wanted to buy a secondhand Rollieflex camera for £25 but because it was German and high class it was made plain that I would never be able to aquire it..however, this did not stop me scraping every penny that i could earn in the hope that I would eventually be able to buy it…..

The area was poorish and there were no supermarket shelves to fill then so I eventually started working on Saturdays for the local blacksmith who had been an army farrier in WW1. His forge was a nice Victorian building but the 'fire' took up most of the tiny space where the work happened. I quickly discovered that this was because most of the building was crammed full of ash from decades of use…he simply raked out the fire and tossed the ash and muck over his shoulder! Also, I learned that there was no electricity in the forge as he did not see the need!…..not when he could get a lad to provide the power, and that was where I came in! In the centre of the dark gloom of the forge was a bright circular object that turned out to be a steel ring polished by countless hands over the decades. This ring and the blackened chain above it powered the air to the fire and pulling the ring for 6 hours on a Saturday was almost beyond me as a 14 year old boy…..I used to leave the forge and stagger thru the village more dead than alive.

Teh pay was dismal at "one and six" for a days graft and even I realised that the camera was not really in the frame. However, years later I came to see that I was paid handsomely for my time in that sweltering black dungeon. The 'boss' was frequently the worse for drink and also rabidly left-wing, but when sober was a charming skillfull craftsman who enjoyed teaching his magic to a wide-eyed youngster. Everything was accomplished by the heat of the fire and athletic physicality and it was assumed that I, being much younger, would have no problems matching the sheer physical effort and vigour which were his real stock in trade….no allowances were made for smaller muscles or lesser years…..on one Saturday we 'struck' holes around iron gates to attach chicken wire…my job to support the gate as it was passed thru the fire and the holes made with a single hammer strike. When I could no longer hold the hot gate the boss was forced to search for a copy of the Daily Mirror for me to hold the hot metal with!

I learned many diverse skills from that blacksmith, not all about making things from metal but about the world in general and about people and their hopes and fears, and above all about the trials and tribulations of working with a true eccentric from a bygone age…..