Before I ever got into the business of design, I had 4 jobs. 4 mind bogglingly awful jobs. The last of these was working in a warehouse situated in a narrow, cobbled stone lane not far from the shadows of St Paul’s Cathedral. This was in 1963. City buildings were still blackened by years of ingrained chimney soot and the age of steam, which was still in operation at the time.
The age of steam was still in evidence.
The warehouse belonged to a Londonderry based shirt makers. Each week, a large truck would arrive from Ireland, packed high with a new supply of freshly manufactured shirts…
The location of my last sole destroying job, Black Friars Lane near St Paul's.
My job, as assistant warehouseman - kitted out in a starched brown overall - was to offload endless boxes from the truck and transfer them to the racks of the cavernous warehouse. This was the major event of the week. The rest of the time I was treading water. I worked alongside a man in his late 40s (I was only 17). He was from Northern Ireland and had been a career soldier, until he sustained a back injury and had to leave. This made him very bitter. He seemed to hate everything and everyone, and always had a smell of beer and tobacco about him.
During the long cold winter’s days we would sit, side-by-side in old captain’s chairs, our feet propped up on the edge of a cast iron coke burning stove. We’d drink endless cups of tea, eat buttered buns and read the daily rag…
The most dramatic news of that year as we consumed our buttered buns and mugs of tea.
Above our heads an old station style pendulum clock ticked away the endless days. Outside it always seemed to be raining. Suddenly this would ring…
The main mode of communication. No faxes, computers, mobiles or pagers back then.
‘Hello, warehouse.’ ‘Moss Brothers on the line’. This was the other event of the day, an order for various shirts from the company’s biggest client. So we would spring into action walking down the rows of brown boxes, cherry picking the different shirt styles and sizes required. Then it was back to the chairs, ticking clock and utter boredom. So it went on hour after hour, week after week, month after month.
When I first started I noticed that my ex solider compatriot would disappear at around 11a.m. each day for an hour or so. At the time I was very into the author John Wyndam and would wile the hours away reading. One morning deeply engrossed in ‘Day of the Triffids’, I was disturbed by an eerie breathing sound coming from somewhere in the bowels of the warehouse. I closed the book and made my way along the racks of shirts. The noise increased. As I turned to walk down the next row, there he was, lying on a shelf, cosseted on a camping mattress fast asleep. So that is where he would go each day. Appalled at such a waste of time I went back to my book without disturbing him...
The world to which I escaped.
Even more disturbingly, just a few weeks later, I too had cleared a cranny for myself in another part of the warehouse and initially would read or draw in the womb like space. But slowly I would succumb to sleep or just lay there aimlessly listening to the wind whistling through the ill fitting windows. This was my lowest point and I could see no end and no future.
But I had been attending evening classes where I was studying calligraphy and illuminated lettering for no other reason than it seemed artistic and I needed an outlet for whatever creativity I knew was lurking inside me. Whilst there, I befriended another guy who was attending a course in layout and typography - so I joined that class too. He worked in a small commercial art studio. I begged him to let me know if there were ever any jobs going. Months later he asked, ‘Are you still looking for a job?’ A short time after, I started as messenger, van driver, coffee and tea maker, sweeper and any other lowly job going. But I’d arrived on the first rung of the ladder in what seemed to be a creative world.
Moral of this story: Believe in yourself. Never give up. To find out what happened next click here
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