The Crate Escape, page 3
Time passed, and I put up with the problems at home by still living there but staying away as much as possible and after all, I got on well at work and by working shifts I didn’t have to see that much of him. Whenever we did meet, he always managed to dream up as many insults as his simple brain would allow him to; insults that were always twisted around by me and thrown back at him in the hope of scoring a direct hit!
At work, sunny, or rainy days didn’t seem to matter anymore as I was safely ensconced in the back of the bus with plenty of people to chat to. Older or younger passengers were all to be found there. I just had to collect the fares, then sit down and chat with them. In those days, even the drunks on the late shifts were friendly. If there were no passengers, I still had the beautiful industrial estates, slag heaps or cloudy streets and roads to look at and at the same time dream that next Saturday was Top Rank night.
That was, of course, unless I was working a late shift on Saturday or Sunday, but even then, there was always the weekend after, and I was getting paid every Friday which meant that I always had money!
The Western Welsh Omnibus Company was not a bad place to work after you had slowly adjusted to the shift work that was. With buses leaving the depot all day and night, you really never quite knew where you would be; have you ever been late for work and travelling on the bus when the thought hits you—how come you can be late, but bus drivers and conductors were always on time? They are not! To allow for the fact that in those days, bus crews often had to walk to and from work, mostly in the early morning or late at night; many were late. To compensate for this, companies would operate ‘standby crew’. If you managed to fall out of bed at almost the same time that sane people were just about retiring for the night, then walked about four or five miles in rain, snow or whipping winds, you could arrive at the depot and play one-arm bandits whilst drinking gallons of tea and waiting for the duty inspector to inform you that someone had failed to ‘fall’ out of bed and you had the pleasure of taking a bus on route 303 or whatever. For the remainder of the day, you would be travelling back and forth between the Rhondda Town of Mardy and Cardiff General Bus Station whilst for most of the time, dreaming of the one-arm bandits still waiting for you to play with them at the bus depot!
Summer on the buses was spectacular; most of Wales—or so it seemed—were on holiday and determined to get the most out of the weather by travelling with large families to the coast and seaside resort of Barry Island. Sand, sea, and a large fairground, all wafted over by the sticky smell of candyfloss. A great day was assured, at least for the holidaymakers who didn’t worry too much about having to stand for the entire journey between Cardiff and the coast as all the buses, including the many extras laid on, were completely full and overcrowded.
For the bus conductors who could manage to put up with yelling kids, things were not too bad. Get on the bus, signal the driver that you are full and under threat of death, not to stop at any other stops. Issue seventy-three-day return tickets each to the value of two shillings and three pence (one and two pence for kids), then retire to the bus platform and dream of how much money you could win on those one-arm bandits still back at the depot!
One-arm bandits was a very choice name for those machines because they would rob you blind! They did help you pass the time whilst waiting for your next bus, but hardly ever did they allow you to win. However, they did give the bus company the chance to collect back some of the money that they had paid you in wages. That was until one day…
My driver Jack, a full load of passengers and I, had travelled along the exhilarating route from Cardiff to the Rhondda Town of Mardy. Passing the coal mines and slag heaps, that were the highlights of the journey, we eventually arrived at the terminus located outside the Mardy Working Men’s Club where, as usual, we had twenty minutes to wait before going back down the mountain through Pontypridd and onwards to the megacity of Cardiff.
The club, in one of their rare business endeavours, had managed to make and sell tea, at three pence a cup, to the bus drivers and conductors who had managed to survive the arduous journey up their sacred mountain!
In addition to the business of selling tea, some bright spark had installed a few one-arm bandits in the club’s lobby which, although they were meant for club members the visiting bus crews were encouraged to use, more as a way of extracting money from the visitors than expecting them to win.
Jack and I, each purchased a cup of tea and settled down to spend some money by playing the bandits. At six pence a go, we had spent maybe two shillings and sixpence between us when, much to our surprise, the machine started making all sorts of weird noises and throwing money out and all over the place. This by itself was unbelievable as no one in living memory had ever seen a machine actually pay out more than a few shillings at most but the jackpot, the whole jackpot. This was indeed a miracle!
A miracle that was not lost on the natives and club members who entered the club lobby in droves, growling under their breath that the mighty Western Welsh Omnibus Company was stealing their money. Not a thought was given to the fact that bus crews used those machines every time they bought the club’s teas and that in reality more money had been gambled by visiting drivers and conductors than the whole of the Welsh coal-mining fraternity combined!
Jack and I quickly gathered all the money that the machine had thrown at us and dumping it in my conductor’s money bag, we slowly made a nonchalant retreat whilst pretending not to hear the rising sound of growls coming from an assembled crowd that collectively could have filled a Welsh rugby ground!
We ran the last few feet to the bus, still clutching the money bag, jumped on and sped away. I continually kept looking to see if we were being followed by a horde of ex-rugby players! We didn’t stop at any bus stop until we reached the comparative safety of Pontypridd where the duty inspector approached and asked us what we thought we were doing?
“Going to Cardiff?” I suggested with an innocent grin.
“Well, you’re not supposed to have left Mardy yet.” He snapped back. “Is your watch broken?”
“No, but it looked like it was going to rain, and we didn’t want to get wet.” I offered as a feeble excuse.
“Rain, rain?” He went red in the face as if he were about to explode. “Rain, since when did it matter if the bloody bus gets wet? Now I’ve heard everything except which idiot told you to make sure the bus stays dry!” Unable to think of anything else to say, he then added, before mumbling to himself and walking away, “Wait here until you’re timed to leave!”
Jack asked me what he had to say, and I told him that we had to stay in Pontypridd until the bus got dry. I got another funny look from Jack, but while we were waiting, I counted our winnings, and we shared an amazing six pound ten shillings between us. We never again bought a cup of tea in Mardy Working Men’s Club and never played their one-arm bandits either; in fact, the thought of those Welsh miners growling at us was permanently etched in my mind!
The summer was slowly ending and as holidaymakers began to finish their holidays and return to work, the overtime that bus crews were earning slowly came to an end. That’s not to say I was complaining; I was still earning a reasonable salary and had gradually got used to the walk to and from home at the start and end of each day’s shift.
My sister and her husband used to live with us but after having a baby, they moved out leaving just me, my mother, and my father together in the house. I say together, but that was never the case or even the correct word to use. As a family, we were never together and were completely dysfunctional. My mum, who was also pregnant, was reasonably okay, but father was still fighting his own private war and using every available moment to cause problems.
The pair of them were members of the local labour club which was a working men’s club selling cheap beer but with a much posher name. Every Saturday and Sunday night, the club would throw in bingo and some form of entertainment and my father, who had proudly been elected as the entertainment secretary or some such thing, had a duty to attend. The beer might also have had something to do with that decision. Mother also wanted to go as well but by now she had had the baby, and so a babysitter was required.
I was the first choice, and whenever I was available, I was press-ganged into looking after my baby brother. To be honest, I wasn’t too perturbed by this except for the many rows and arguments that took place between my father and me throughout the week. The one chance I had to get retribution for all the problems he was causing me was to positively refuse to babysit. When the idea that I wasn’t going to do it anymore finally sunk in, they managed to press-gang my father’s older sister, who was a spinster, to take over the job. She appeared quite happy to accept the challenge as if nothing else it got her out of her house over the weekend and she received free meals. However, it never stopped the arguments between him and me, and if anything, they only got worse!
Apart from the constant arguments where he was always right and everyone else was wrong (he argued with my mother almost as much as he argued with me), there was a problem of things going missing and, needless to say, I always got the blame. The fact that he gambled on horses often and liked to drink, with both pursuits costing money, was never taken into consideration by anyone at the time; if it had been, maybe I wouldn’t have taken the blame for his wrongdoings as at that time I didn’t gamble, hardly ever drank and anyway had more money than he did.
I think that toward the end of that period and certainly in later years, my mother had seen the light and deep down knew who the guilty person was! I suppose in truth, although I gave my mother money every week, I would never give or lend him a penny, it didn’t help matters one iota but just gave him more reason to seek revenge on me. I still believe to this day, many years later, that he was the most horrible person I ever knew, and I expect that if he were still alive, he would say the same thing about me.
I had, on one or two occasions, thought of looking at somewhere else to live, but in those days, most landlords didn’t like the idea of an eighteen-year-old boy renting their property, and that was quite apart from the fact that most places available to rent were not exactly nice places to live in; well, certainly not for teens who were perhaps used to more space in which to do their own thing regardless of how much trouble it caused.
Apart from all that being considered, who would wake me up for work in the morning?
One morning, someone had woken me up, my mother I guess; well, it would have to have been as the only time he came in my bedroom was to search for money or anything he could sell. I had left for work and was sitting in the bus garage reading a copy of the local paper. The news was not that interesting, and I was just about to throw away the offending publication when something caught my eye.
Chapter Five
Glancing through the classifieds in the newspaper there were various adverts for the usual types of consumer products one would normally see advertised followed, in the employment section, by a few jobs available. The local steel mill was looking for staff as were several other employers who were offering equally boring jobs. My attention was suddenly attracted to one advert where the advertiser was seeking employees to work on the railway. I laughed to myself as I thought of the poor travelling public. I mean our bus service was bad enough, but compared to the railway, we were nothing but bloody angels!
Mumbling to myself, I wondered why I was looking at it, after all, working on any form of public transport was pretty much the same, and I already had a job on the buses. However, I continued to read until I finally realised that the advertised positions were in Victoria.
Who wants to live in London, I thought? Victoria Station might be a good place to work, but London was expensive; besides, I had nowhere up there to live. I still carried on reading, and it was only near the very bottom of the advert that I suddenly realised that the job on the railway was not in London but in Victoria—Australia!
Australia, I smiled at the thought. The money they were offering was better than I was currently earning here, and it would get me away from the slag heaps of the Rhondda Valley, and surprise, surprise it would also get me away from the house or at least the person that, in my mind, was ruining my life.
They were holding interviews for the next two days in a building opposite Queen Street Railway Station which was Cardiff’s second railway station and, in a building, known as the Masonic Hall. These were walk-in interviews; no appointment necessary, just turn up!
I had a two or three-hour break that afternoon and so, after ripping the advert out of the newspaper, I jumped on a bus that was leaving the depot and heading in the general direction of the bus station. From there, it was an easy walk to the building where the interviews were being held. As I was walking it started raining so, pulling up the collar of my Western Welsh uniform, I made my way to the interview. I did not really mind getting wet, but I hated having a damp shirt collar.
The advert had said nineteen years of age and older, but I didn’t think that it would matter very much, as I’d be old enough in June and that was just three months away. In any case, they could say no for many reasons, and just going for an interview didn’t automatically mean that even if I was offered, I’d take the job.
Soaking wet I arrived outside the building and pulled my coat collar down to make myself look respectable before I gingerly entered the building.
“Excuse me,” I said to the first official-looking figure to come into view, “is this where they are holding interviews for Australia?” With a brief nod of the head, he pointed me across the room to a table and an empty chair. Gingerly, I approached the chair before being scanned up and down by an older smiling man who then asked me to take a seat.
“Thinking of changing your life, are you, young man?” He smiled.
“Well, yes,” I mumbled, remembering at the last minute to smile back.
“Are you employed now?”
“Yes,” I answered looking down at my uniform.
“Where do you work?”
“Western Welsh, I’m a bus conductor.” I gushed back at him.
At this point, I was half expecting him to wish me a good day and inform me that he had no vacancies for bus conductors but, to my sheer surprise, he started to inform me of the abundant job opportunities that he had to offer. With my experience in public transport, I was exactly what they were looking for! I thought he was going to offer me the Managing Directors position!
I was tempted to ask if they had slag heaps in Australia the same as we had in the Rhondda Valley but thought better of it and kept my mouth tightly shut.
He carried on in his Australian accent, and before everything he said had fully sunk in, there I was, signing various documents and being whisked behind a screen where I was poked and prodded by two doctors before being pronounced healthy, fully fit, and still living. Returning to my smiling gentleman, I again sat down, and he formally offered me the job. There and then! I’d got a new job in Australia!
For a few moments, I really thought that they were going to immediately send me but was greatly relieved to hear that I had to wait at least a further three months until I was nineteen. After all, I reasoned to myself the problem with leaving the same day was that I had an afternoon shift to finish and did not even have a suitcase with me! Well, one didn’t usually carry one’s possessions with one when working an afternoon shift even if you did live in Cardiff.
And that was that!
The smiling Australian told me that all the documents required would be sent to my home address, the Australian government would pay my fare and that I didn’t even have to pay the ten pounds that most immigrants had to pay toward the transport charge as I would be underage, whatever that meant, at the time of travel.
I walked back to work in a bit of a daze not even noticing the rain just wondering what had hit me. I mean, I liked my job, I earned a reasonable salary, I had friends and family in Cardiff, and I didn’t even know where Australia was. Much less how I was going to get there and what to expect when I arrived!
I didn’t tell anyone what I had done, the fact was that to some extent, even I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but that I had been offered a job in some far-off place where we had in the past deported criminals and as far as I was then aware, we could still be deporting them! I decided to think about things a lot more before saying a word to anyone.
For a few days, I played around in my head with the idea unsure if I really wanted to go or not. Some of my thoughts seemed quite pleasant whilst others completely turned me off the idea. Finally, I decided the time had come to tell a few friends and gauge their reaction. For the most part, that was like talking to a plant of wood. Their first question was why I wanted to go there. My answer was equally daft when I replied that I didn’t know. The conversation then changed to more academic content as we discussed the actual location of Australia and was it nearer to the UK than America, Canada or even New Zealand? To be quite honest, the only reason we could name these countries was because they all kept advertising for Brits to leave the rain and the slag heaps behind and join them whilst making a new life for themselves in paradise. It was just luck that Australia had managed to get to me first, otherwise, this book may have been about my trials and tribulations in Canada!
It didn’t take long before I received a few documents from Australia House which at the time was located on the Strand in London. They officially informed me that I had been accepted by this great commonwealth nation, and that I would need to stay there for a minimum of two years after which, should I wish to return to the UK, I was free to do so. Should I leave before the two years had expired, I was expected to pay not only my return fare but to also reimburse the Australian government for my fare over there. I would not require a passport for travel as I would be issued an identity card that was valid for a single journey only between the two countries. One document that stood out was to be signed by my parent or guardian and returned as soon as possible so that the Australians could arrange a departure date.
