job

bruntsfield

I started off my janitorial life as cleaner in Bruntsfield, mum was a teacher there, she got me a job for the summer clean. This was a thing then, jannies hired and fired cleaners, people who worked in education obtained last-chance employment for their useless, or student, offspring this way. The summer clean was a thing then too.

The summer clean is long gone now. My part in the process, that year, involved moving all the desks out of the classrooms, throwing buckets of soapy water onto the floor, scrubbing them with the rotary machine, sooking up the slurry with the sooker, doing the skirtings with ‘green pad’ to remove the greasy-black build up of Kleengel™ and finally sealing with Bourneseal™. Strictly speaking this was all janitor’s work but I didn’t know that then.

My memories of that summer are of slanted sunlight and shadows in hot, high, bare classrooms. Of golden motes slowly drifting in the rafters. The smell of wet wood, of sore knees, of wet feet, of the cloying chemical tang of drying Bourneseal, of the vinegar we used to prepare the floor for seal. There was no real noise, the scratch of scrubbing pad, the thick slup of seal in its pan, the jugga-jagga of the buffer, the ascending slurp of the sooker. Like penitent monks we worked in silence, there was no talk.

I was partnered with Alan, an intense, black, saturnine man. Shabbily dressed in murky, he worked fast, charging at whatever we were doing with a zest, gleaming with sweat, his thin hair slicked into a point at the rear, small black eyes burning with fury. His sole interest in other people was, do you think they make one hundred pounds a week? It may have been his sole interest in life, I don’t remember him ever saying anything else.

Half way through a shift we stopped for a tea break, which we took in a small room, a cupboard with a window really, filled with wet mops, broken cleaning equipment, lollipop mens’ winter coats and hundreds of old paint cans. We sat, elbow poking elbow, around a table and listened as the janny enlarged upon his philosophies.

This janny, Jimmy, was a stocky sepia man with a cigarette constantly on the go. He wore the traditional brown janny’s coat, black-slick with wear at cuff and arse. He shambled around, oddly silent, in a pair of brown slippers without any socks. This, the lack of socks, was deeply unsettling to me. I had an almost physical revulsion to the sight, his skin was an unhealthy grey colour. Why it was this, rather than any other aspect of his dress or manner that made me dislike him I don’t know.

His philosophies were ones of sloth. Any activity, ambition or doctrine that involved expending effort was bafflingly suspicious to his way of thinking. Today’s joggers would have caused him an existential pain. I remember the sad lost look on his crumpled grey face, its big pulpy nose, marbled with black veins, wobbling as he shook his head in confusion about some aspect of human behaviour. No matter who else was around the table it was always to me that he addressed these pensées. I suspect that this was because my mother was a teacher rather than of anything about me. Alan sat on my right, head nodding fiercely, looking for an opportunity to ask about someone’s weekly take home.

Eventually a fag would be stubbed out, his cup drained and he would begin the process of rising to his feet. This was our cue to resume work. He would repair to the medical room for a sleep on the couch there. I used to have fun ringing the bell that called for the janny, running to the top of the stairs and watching through the railings as he lurched, confused, out of the room, clutching at his disarray.

Towards the end of the summer teachers started to filter back into school, to set up their classrooms for the new term. This involved us in re-setting their furniture which, despite the maps we had drawn on the blackboards, was, “in a complete disarray”. And once a primary teacher has caught hold of you they will find a thousand and one, and another one, tasks with which you can help them. Cleaning took a bit of a backseat for a while. Other cleaners started to appear too, back from their holidays, of particular note was Mary.

Mary was a barrel-bodied wee woman perched on a pair of short, nearly cylindrical legs. Her feet were splayed under her weight but she tottered around with a curious grace. Her head was topped off with a poodle-style mop of curly black hair. Really she should have been rosy cheeked but she wasn’t, the cheeks were just right, the colour was wrong. Her big blue eyes were full of a delightful mischief. She was a carer as well as a cleaner. She might have been good at it for all I knew but I always felt that even if she was rubbish she was in the right job; she had a knack for making people happy, her clients must have been delighted to see her. I’m not sure how to go about fixing the world, a good start would be a few more Marys.

Her path and mine would cross and uncross over the years. If we weren’t working at the same school we would see each other in the street, or in Clancy's. Clancy’s was a wee pub hanging over the approach road, it’s gone now. It had a clientele that matched the local demographic: bikers, builders, wee old men and women and “the drug prowling horde”. It was the place to go if you weren’t a bammer — they drank in the ‘nam. [Now the Fountainbridge Tap or something, then called something else but nicknamed the Vietnam.] Clancy’s had a good jukebox and the place was always full of laughter. I dropped in there often, especially when I lived nearby.

So the summer idled to its end. Outside of work it was the usual round of pubs and parties, football in the park, barbecues and playing at being a grown-up. I felt reasonably content, I seemed to have some foot in the world again. And so it was that I stayed on after the summer to become a proper cleaner.

cleaner

Every job has its hidden arts I suppose, the secrets that you can only learn by doing the job, cleaning certainly has them. Cleaners are human Sparrows: ubiquitous, unostentatious and unseen by most. No, unseen is the wrong word, unremarked might be a better one. Every building, be it school, hospital or office you visit will have its crew, a hidden artel, a semi-secret community with a rich life of its own. With hum-drum routines and friendships, where meaningful looks are exchanged, where passions are stirred and feuds are begun.

Everyone cleans, men not so much perhaps, but more or less everyone; even Her late Majesty of blessed memory was said to don the pink marigolds on occasion. There’s a difference between cleaning your living room every so often and spending your working hours cleaning up after others. The task has been altered, the parameters changed. Basically you learn how to skimp, to do the least possible. To see, through cleaner’s eyes, the dirt and to judge how much of it others will notice. All dirt must go at some stage but some of it doesn’t have to be banished today if nobody but you notices it.

I’ve put that wrongly — I’ve made it seem like cleaners just want to be lazy, on the whole they don’t, but the way you clean changes. Your use of your time changes — sometimes you’ll spend an hour on one room and five minutes on the rest. Cleaning up after others is a marathon, cleaning your house is a sprint. Cleaners are the equivalent of those thin figures who run long-distance races, not the muscle-bound sprinters of the hundred meters. This metaphor has now been tortured to death methinks. Hopefully you get the idea, I’ve done my best.

My section was the top floor, six rooms and a staff only toilet. I had the boys’ toilets to do first, literally a shitty job, the young aim their bottoms like grown men aim their cocks, then I went up the stairs to sweep and wipe desks. Occasionally I’d mop a floor using an ancient tin bucket on wheels and a Kentucky mop. There would be teachers still working when I started cleaning, they soon left, leaving me on my own in the quiet. I wandered the high rooms. In summer in the golden light that shone through the huge skylights, in the winter in the half-dark provided by the pendant fluorescents.

If I wasn’t lazy I could finish my section easily. I’d even have time to do a wee bit extra somewhere — clean shelves, deep-clean the toilet, tidy the teacher’s desk. If I was lazy I could leave stuff for the morning to be finished off.

I remember the mornings best, they were the worst. We started at six and after a cup of tea I did the girls’ toilets. These were bleak, beyond bleak actually, sepulchral might be the word. This wasn’t a place for the living, even at the height of summer these middens hosted no flys. On a winter’s morning, illuminated by the inadequate light from a couple of dim bulbs, the floor a ringing ox-blood red tile, cold and damp and smelly and awful, it seemed to be the very portal of Tartarus. I can’t remember how many stalls there were but I remember the process: flush; wipe the cistern and bowl with luke-warm soapy water; fill the porcelain holder with a packet of razor-sharp Izal toilet paper; use the bog brush; flush again; finally mop your way out.

This all took about forty-five minutes by which time I’d be freezing. When I went to my section I’d curl up against one of the big iron radiators to get warm again. If I hadn’t been lazy the night before there was nothing to do. I usually read a book that was there. Because these were aimed at children, who notice crap, some were very good. I particularly remember Moomin Valley in Autumn, Wild Wood and Minnow on the Say . Something about their wistfulness caught my mood at the time. I had to keep an eye out for teachers and Davy but I was usually unbothered. At eight I would go down to use the only hoover in the school to hoover the carpet in the dining hall.

The weeks went past, the seal that we’d laid down in summer gradually wore away where the desks and chairs moved and people walked. I was living at home with my parents so the money was enough and there was always overtime. When I became a janny I realized why this was. A school was allotted a certain number of cleaning hours, there were never enough cleaners, so the difference was made up with overtime whether there was anything to do or not. This was exploited by the jannies to get themselves overtime, they needed to be there for the cleaners so they got overtime too.

So the year passed. Ali was president of the student union at Moray House that year, so we spent a lot of time in the bar there. My life was in a pleasant limbo. This was the mid-eighties, the miners’ strike was crawling to its inevitable end. We had lost, we weren’t going to change the world, there was no point in dreaming any more. Our future had been ripped up, we were the enemy within that they’d routed. They cackled their triumph, waving their cash. What was the point? So I cleaned.

As a cleaner you start to pick up the rhythms of the school: the day; the holidays; any special event. You’re a semi-detatched participant, on the edge of that world. Slowly I was being drawn in to school life. I won’t say that I noticed this at the time, being a cleaner was only a part of my life, I was busy frittering away the last of my youth the rest of the time. But, at the end of the next summer Jimmy had a stroke, I was made up to janny, this was a real change.

becoming a janny

My janitorial life started in an atmosphere of mild panic, the reason? Davy. Davy had been Jimmy’s assistant, the boilerman, and as such he knew only half the job. The thought of responsibility terrified him and he made sure that everyone knew this. The first day was spent in a series of frantic conferences where Davy shook his head and wittered nonsense. Eventually Mike was called over from Boroughmuir. This was my first meeting with Mike, I was impressed. If I had one complaint it was that he seemed to like talking a wee bit too much; he over explaining everything. He did sort everything out though, he reassured Davy and showed us how to do the paperwork. We were set it seemed, although Davy was still shaking his head and claiming that it was all beyond him.

Poor Davy, I came to love him but there was no doubting that he was an idiot, one of nature’s bunglers and dupes. Mike said that he was useless because he’d been a pongo, by which he meant a soldier, and not required to think. This was a wee bit harsh but had a grain of truth. Davy had done national service in Israel during the end of the mandate. Incredibly he had no stories to tell about his time there.

Davy was short, fattish, balding, he didn’t have a comb-over but it was heading that way. He wore a battered peaky blinders cap and looked up at the world through a pair of heavy framed glasses. From the start he leaned heavily on me. In fact in his own hapless fashion he took advantage of me. We used to get a free lunch from the kitchen which he always got for us, once I caught him eating the chips from my plate out of the side of his mouth as he brought the plates through. I could only admire the mandibular dexterity. Everything was slanted in his favour, overtime, breaks, work and my lunch plate it seemed; he got the better end of every deal. This didn’t bother me too much, I was happy enough to let him have his win. I was never sure if he realized that I noticed.

Davy had an undeserved reputation for laziness, this was unfair, he worked very hard, he just worked stupid. Work is a theatre, much of the effort is back-stage and unseen. If you want to get a reputation for diligence, you have to appear on the stage, your work needs to be noticed. Davy didn’t get this, what he did went unnoticed.

Davy was a perpetually worried wee man, always fussing and fretting. This used to get on my nerves at the time, it wouldn’t now. Well it would, I’d just deal with it better. The only time he settled was when he was with Ruby, his wife. She used to sit with him when he did overtime, doing her knitting. They were the sweetest of couples, I suppose that they were in their mid-fifties at the time, they still held hands in the street. That was one of the things that I loved about Davy. But mostly I loved him because he meant no wrong, there was no harm in the wee man.

And so, after a stressful start I settled in to learning my new duties. The most onerous of my new tasks was the pool.

There are three aspects to looking after a pool: the cleaning, the backwash and the testing and dosing. The cleaning was fairly obvious, the backwash I got the hang of when I understood what was going on, testing was chemistry, something I knew about, the dosing was the real concern. Davy showed me what to do but I wasn’t sure if he really understood what he was doing. There was something mechanical about the way that he told it, a series of steps to be taken rather than a process he understood. There was no documentation, even at that time I found this strange; my only other real experience of work was the Post Office where there were reams of paperwork for even the slightest of tasks. To have nothing at all written down felt odd. There wasn’t even anything that came with the chemicals, none of the COSHE sheets that we’d have today. There wasn’t anwhere to find out anything either. This was in the days before the internet. I was on my own.

Something else, that I notice now but wouldn’t have then, was that Davy and I never invented shared language for talking about the pool. By language I mean a slang, or a shorthand made-up to discuss what you are doing. Nearly always, in my experience, when you share a job with others you create a story and some words for the telling of it. This shared lexicon can be a mere metronome for timing the task up to a fully-fledged dictionary but usually there are some words. Not to have any is odd.

We don’t need to go all Wittgenstein and develop a theory of language to explain why this is so — usually you invent a word because you need something more specific than the words available. There is also an amount of tradition involved, I don’t think that the boys realize that some of the things I say to them are the same ones said to me in the same situation thirty years ago. They may pass them on to their boys, if they have any.

Many years later I did a pool training course, there were textbooks and tests, a tutor was shipped in all the way from Yorkshire. Bosses were present, it was all very organized and formal. This confirmed to me the view that I held then; that what I was doing was pretty dangerous and I was pretty ignorant.

The main danger was the chlorinating agent itself. This came as a strong smelling white powder in a large tub. I added it to the pool using an old soup ladle, straight from the bucket, my PPE consisted of a pair of black rubber gloves. No mask, not even an apron. Nothing bad ever happened to me, nor, as far as I’m aware, to any other Edinburgh janny but that can only be down to pure chance.

This is one of the examples that I’d throw in the faces of those who complain about, health and safety gone mad if I could be bothered to argue with them. The reason we have rules and proceedures nowadays is normally because something went wrong in the past. The type of wrong where condolences are expressed, investigations are ongoing and lessons have been learned. These rules are there because people have died, been horribly mangled or in some way had their lives ruined. Take the tale of asbestos as an example.

I now, thanks be to the god of jannies, work in a school free from asbestos, but too much of my life has been wasted dealing with the filthy stuff. As a young child I remember throwing sheets of asbestos roofing into a fire in the back garden. It made a very satisfying crack. It wasn’t considered dangerous then I assume. It was at Bruntsfield that I first bacame aware of how dangerous it was. I read something in a union health & safety sheet about its many evils. I decided to see if I could find any in the school. It was only everywhere.

It was under the shelves over the radiators, there were cupboards entirely made out of it, it was on ironing boards, it lagged the pipes in the boiler house. The worst bit was a sheet that had been used to board up an archway to create the staffroom. There was a door with a closer that repeatedly rattled this, it was visibly crumbling round the doorfame. I wasn’t sure that this was asbestos but it looked very suspicious.

What happened next shows how much things have changed in some ways. I reported all of my findings to our clark of works Donny, a long man with short brown curly hair and the most astonishing pair of blue eyes. I never warmed to Donny, he treated Davy badly and me as a child.

Donny’s attitude was, why are you bothering me with this rubbish? I had to get one of the cleaners, who was also a parent, to write a letter of complaint to the council for anything further to be done. Eventually a couple of supercilious experts appeared to pooh-pooh our fears, it was only brown asbestos, not the nasty blue stuff. They got a few bits and pieces removed and painted some of the worst stuff. The seemed satisfied that they’d done more than enough. They had better things to do with their time.

Nowadays heads would have expolded and people might have been sacked. I think that a couple of things have changed since those days: our professionalism and our attitude to asbestos. That we’ve come to understand asbestos better isn’t remarkable but the, what I’ve called, professionalism is more interesting. I’ve called it professionalism but it’s more than that. The experts treated us in an off-hand manner because they felt that they could. These were the days before the internet, they were the experts. even if we didn’t believe them it was hard for us to assemble the facts to prove them wrong. That’s something good that the internet has done for us at least — it has levelled the knowledge playing field a wee bit.

About this time Pam and Claire needed someone to doss in the boxroom of the flat they were going to rent in Roseburn. So I moved out of my parents’ house and returned to the wild.

hughy

Hughy was exiled to Boroughmuir for re-education. The exact nature of the crime he had committed to warrant this was never made clear to us. He claimed that it was because he had ordered too much stock and his store cupboard was a regular cornucopea of cleaning supplies. So selling cleaning products for one thing then. None of us believed that this was the only reason. There must have been something else — if only that he was always half drunk.

Hughy fell only a wee bit short of presenting as a distinguished old man. He had a large shock of white hair, fine blue eyes and a hansome angular face that should have been attractive. All was spoiled by his battleship-grey skin and the large red nose of the immoderate soak. He didn’t stand out as a drunk, he seemed quite alert and he didn’t smell of drink exactly, it was a more powerful yeasty smell, like living next to a brewery. Even if this hadn’t been a problem his teeth would have doomed him. I say his teeth but he had none of his own, he a top and bottom set which through some triumph of dentistry didn’t fit to the exact amount so as to render his every utterance a series of liquid sibilant clacks. You could understand what he was saying, just, but it was difficult to concentrate on anything but the rattling of teeth.

Hughy led a very regular life. Seven in the morning saw him in a Leith pub having his simple breakfast of a couple of pints. At eleven thirty it was his lunch break which he spent in some private club in Morningside that he’d blagged his way into. There he had four pints. On his return he had his actual lunch, salmon paste sandwiches, then spent the rest of the afternoon collecting coppers for his grand kids in the playground. At four thirty it was back off to Leith for some more pints before buying the forty ounce bottle of whisky with which he would spend the evening. As Charlie said, he was always topping up. You rarely saw him actually drunk. Well once, maybe. For some reason he’d been working overtime, so he was drinking cheep german wine with us, which messed up his rythym. He spent the afternoon gibbering incoherently in the corner of the howf. It all ended badly when he got an electric shock from a wet-buffer and spat his teeth half-way across the room.

There was some mystery to Hughy: he claimed to have been to Edinburgh University, he owned several flats which he rented and he hadn’t spoken to his son for years. We got this from scraps of his conversation, he wasn’t very forthcoming.

For us Hughy was a bird of passage, after six months he was gone. His penance done, re-education complete. He went off to cover holidays and sickness in other schools. We lost the very light touch of him that we had. We did see a letter from a headteacher, it was evidence in some union case of Mike’s. Her janny had been sent home for being pissed and she was pleased at the arrival of the very competent… Hughy? How drunk was her janny, that Hughy was an improvement?

daft davy

Davy was built on the grand scale, muscular, six foot odd, topped off with a bonnet of ginger wire. There was nothing of the Greek ideal about him, the parts were all there, somehow they just didn’t fit together right. He had that rather raw looking skin that some red-heads have, as if the surface layer of had been grated off, leaving a slightly reddened underlayer. He reminded me of hot-shot Hamish, there was a loud clumsy destructiveness about him, anything that was near him was in danger. I rather liked him, although it was clear that his janitorial career would end in disaster.

Eventually Davy got the job at Dalry. It went as well as you might imagine.

a sandwich with wee john

Exams are a pain for all, even if you’re only setting up the desks. Back in the day this task usually fell to wee John and I. It should have been a four person job but wee John and I usually ended up doing this on our own. I preferred it that way, I think that John did too.

Wee John was the third janny in the pecking order at Boroughmuir, I was the fourth. He had the tied house in Montpelier Park opposite St. Ozzy’s which was his special responsibility. He was four foot nothing (probably about four feet ten) with short wiry brown hair and a pair of glasses that magnified his eyes to brown hugeness.

He had all the diseases traditional to working man of his age in that day: diabetes, bad eyes, bad feet, arthritis of every member, few teeth and piles. You would often find him squirming his bum on the edge of a stool, eyes clenched like a cat being stroked, to obtain a measure of relief from the last.

In his day he’d been quite the footballer, the story was that he would have played for Hearts if he hadn’t been so wee. When we and Charlie’s kids played three-and-in in the school doorway you could see that he had once been very good. Despite his infirmities he could sell you a dummy with a slow snake of the body, without moving his feet.

When it came to setting up for exams, I would unstack the desks, which towered up against the War Memorial, way above John’s head, and barrowed them over to just where he wanted them so that he could place them out. Unstacking the desks went faster than setting them out, so every so often I’d do a bit of placement so things were evened up. Slowly we raced through the job.

We never talked much, perhaps an enquiry about the pudger every now and then. The pudger, Pudger McGudger to give it its full name, was an old badminton stand that we used to pudge (lever) stacks of desks up against, and away, from the wall. We needed to talk about this as it was a two person task, one to hold the stack as the other pudged. We had names for a lot of our tools, Barry McGarry was another one. Doof McNaffer was our generic name for a tool.

John, being diabetic had to eat to a schedule, so at ten o’clock we went over to his house for a snack. His door looked like someone had taken an axe to it. Which is exactly the case, the culprit was him, several times. For a janny he had a strange proclivity for losing his keys. In fact of losing his anything. When we lifted the carpet in his house when he moved out we found ten bank cards that he’d stashed away there over the years. There was a big notice on the inside of the door — remember your keys. As I always say, people don’t read signs.

The snack consisted of a random can of beer from the collection that people had brought over when they were first-footing. This was poured into a wet glass of the wrong size, it came with its can looking flat and the sandwich. The sandwich was a thing of such wonder that it deserves its own chapter, we’ll make do with a paragraph.

The sandwich was made with soft white bread, crudely spread with butter straight from the chiller cabinet of the fridge. It was now a string vest of a thing. Edam was our cheese, a difficult cheese for even a cheesemonger to cut into slices. John hacked it into various multi-sized irregular-prisms that everywhere poked through the bread. He didn’t even cut the sandwich in half, ensuring that there was no way that you could eat it without some part of it falling onto the floor.

We would sit there companionably, me reading The Scotsman, him the Record, eating our snacks, picking up cheese from the floor. Sometimes we might chat about football, Charlie and Mike’s stupidities or those of other people we knew. John had a good instinct for people, he saw through their lies, he could often predict their behavior. Soon enough it was time to get back to

John is gone now, I miss him, those days, and his sandwiches.

a bad idea

When I first started at Boroughmuir, in the late eighties, the school was being renovated. In those days the school was split over two buildings — the main school at Viewforth, and the Junior School on the Links. S1/2 did their learning at the Junior school, S3-6 were in the main school. So we had a reasonable amount of space, which may have led to the, interesting, decision to renovate the place while we were still in it. Chunks of the main school would get boarded off, the workies would do their business and then it was on to another chunk. Whatever the merits of this plan it had one big up side — it involved plenty of moving stuff around, which meant plenty of overtime for us jannies.

In those far-off days groups of janitors from different schools often gathered for a weekend of overtime. You’ll notice I said overtime, not work, there’s a reason for that. The weekend, at Boroughmuir, always developed along similar lines:

Saturday 08:30–09:30

We sat around drinking coffee and telling war tales. Of headteachers stymied, supervisors reduced to tears and work avoided. Nearly all lies.

Saturday 09:30–13:00

Some work is done.

Saturday 13:00–17:00

Lunch is held in the pub, where more tales are told.

Saturday 17:00

The day is finished. We all head off, to the pub for a night of continued debauchery in most cases.

Sunday 08:30–11:30

People arrived, at various times, hungover, shaking, red-eyed, a shameful bunch of wasters. Not much talking is done until the hair-of-the-dogs start to kick in.

Sunday 11:00

It is agreed that we should do some work.

This particular weekend we were clearing furniture from the top floor. It all had to be carried down the stairs (we didn’t have a lift in those days). It was a considerable pain: bulky and heavy. Cupboards took four of us to carry down to the skip, which was situated in the courtyard below. It was only a matter of time, and drink tooken, before someone suggested that we cut out the middleman — the stairs.

——Why don’t we just chuck it out the window?

Said someone, eyeing the skip four floors below. The wasn’t much of a discussion, in a trice a cupboard was hanging out of the window and so were the jannies, we all wanted to see this. It was heaved out. The first thing that we all noticed was that it wasn’t going to hit the skip. Then there was the noise. We weren’t the only people to notice the noise. Remember it was a quiet Sunday morning, the sound of a cupboard exploding after a hundred feet drop was noticeable. Almost immediately the windows of tenements opposite were filled with faces. Scared pale faces. A noise that loud signalled nothing good.

We were professional, we knew just what to do — we locked up the school and fled to the pub. I was sent back later to sweep up the remains of the cupboard, but we never heard anything more about it. Probably did the neighbours some good — a wee bit of adrenaline on a Sunday morning.

the jape

Mike was on a diet, which annoyed me. Not because he was on a diet, but because he was cheating and lying about it. He was on the Complan and he claimed to have, “just a bowl of soup’ for his lunch. I was suspicious so I asked Bonny, from the kitchen, about it. Bonny’s eyes flashed, and although I couldn’t see any steam I heard it venting from her head, “bowl of soup? bowl of soup? He has at least three courses, and as many extra puddings as he can cram down his fat gob.” It was as I expected.

I should explain Mike’s lunch routine, it’s going to be important to what follows. Drunk or sober, Mike always went down to the kitchen for lunch where there was a table reserved for staff. The Head (Tom D.) had his lunch there, who Mike liked to hobnob with. I went once, which was once too often. Mike always put on his uniform jacket for the occasion.

In those days our uniform consisted of a grey suit. Mostly we just wore the trousers; wee John and I, who were working jannies, wore the traditional brown dustcoats, mine festooned with costume jewellery. Why? Somebody lost a broach, which I put on my dustcoat with the idea that they’d see it and claim it. People started to give me jewels, eventually I had quite a collection. Yes, I was an arse then too. Mike’s jacket, which lived on the back of his chair, was festooned too, not with tasteful baubles but with union badges and the like. He always wore it to lunch.

Which gave me the idea — one jacket looked much like another; wee John’s was much smaller than Mike’s. A substitution might be arranged? So for the rest of the week we indulged in banter along the following lines:

——Are you sure you’re on a diet? You look like you’re putting on weight.

Come Friday the switch was made. Care was taken to ensure that the badges were correctly positioned and the contents of his pockets were transfered across. Just before lunch wee John and I took up position. Me at the counter, wee John bottom-perched on an apex of the filing cabinet in an attempt to assuage the wrath of his bum-grapes. Wee John was a martyr to his piles. Mike donned the jacket.

There was a slight pause as his arm extended out of the sleave more than usual but it was just a blip. The penny half dropped as he tried to get the other arm in, he took the jacket off and held it up. He turned it back and forth. Another attempt was made which failed in a similar manner.

——I told you were putting on weight, you don’t even fit into your jacket now.

——Perhaps Complan is fattening.

——Sure has porked Mike up.

At this point we started laughing and Mike realized what we’d done. He chucked the jacket on the floor.

——You f____ b____.

He stormed out without a jacket but in compensation he sported a head like a giant tomato. I decided to make myself scarce — He would have sensed that this was my idea and would have made me suffer. (He once made me clean the boiler house at St. Oswald’s, the janitorial version of being sent to the gulags, after I’d put up posters of him dressed as a clown collecting for red nose day labeled: Mad Cow Disease — shock new findings.

——Tell him I’ve been sent to North Merchy. I said over my shoulder as I headed for the pub.

My only regret is that we didn’t loosen the seams.