A Gravy-Stained Time Machine
It must have been a strange sight: a large, portly gentleman in a checked linen Borsalino, sitting on the passenger side of a beaten-up left-hand drive Rav4. Well past his prime, just like the car.
Its blue-green paintwork was as faded as his hair and patchy, like his memory. His eyes glazed with a faraway look. Gravy running down his beard and a distant stare, indeed, fifty years or more into the past.
And that old man? He’s no longer old. He’s no longer sat in the Toyota but lost in thought, sitting in the crew room of his Dad’s garage, reunited briefly with his father. And so, the old man smiles. If he was the emotional type, you might even have spotted a tear.
Maybe he’s crying; perhaps he’s not. But he is lost in time. Trapped. Between two worlds. The past, and the here and now. But what has caused this confusion? This glitch in his timeline?
A slip in the space-time continuum? A wormhole in the very fabric of time? A time tunnel with its entrance camouflaged as the exit of a Sainsbury’s multistory car park? No, it’s something even more complex than that. A steak pie. And what’s even better than a steak pie?
A reduced steak pie.
The Proustian Grenade
The sensations began racing as soon as he held the package. Not hot, but warm like a small bird cradled in his hand. The plastic crispy from hours in the warmer. Indeed, it is so brittle that it flakes during the unveiling. However, all such sensations, those properties so advantageous in pastry, are absent in the pie itself.
The poor thing has sat in the sun of the warming oven for far too long and now suffers from the steak pie equivalent of sunstroke. It is hard and hard-baked. It smells faintly of hot plastic. The car itself is full of aromas. A heady nostalgic mix. Cellophane and pie factory, not pie.
There is a difference.
PIE – Perfect in Everyway
If only they knew, knew that the gateway to time travel was a PIE – Perfect In everyway. Thanks to that mix of cheap meat, beef, I think, but who really knows, some gristle, and filled with slightly too much dark brown gravy. I have been transported. For that old man is me.
Whoosh.
I hurtle back through my backstory.
Whoosh.
The years roll back, and I almost feel sick. Or is that the pie? Joking, of course. It’s lovely. Proper Job. As they say in Devon. Proper job, indeed.
Crew Room Noir
As soon as I bite, it all comes rushing back at me. As does the gravy. My teeth bite down through the tough, leathery exterior into the soft, yielding, still slightly doughy interior, and the rich gloopy gravy shoots out all over my beard and hands. Blowback. Payback. Flashback.
It’s exquisite.
The gravy, more industrial than gourmet. Has triggered a chain reaction in my brain. Memories spill out like warm filling. Had it been the very elixir of youth, the effects would have been no less dramatic.
That old man is no longer sitting in that ageing SUV.
No. He is sat 200 miles and fifty years away.
The room is full of tobacco smoke. Not the boardroom kind. Not cigars, but cheap fags, Player’s No10, Woodbine’s, and roll-ups. The blue haze is intense. And softens the room and the memories. At the other end of the fog he can make out one of the directors of this company, filling his pie with chilli sauce. His Dad. The old man’s eyes water at the memory, and it’s not the smoke. Or the chilli.
The Swear Engine
The young man, for that, is him now, sits lapping up every sight and every sound. A boy in a man’s world. No conversational concessions have been made. Much is over his head. The bawdy jokes, the conquests. Drunken nights and fisherman’s tales. Punchlines he did not understand then have been lost in the mists of time. If only he could remember them. Would he laugh or be shocked? Such is his assimilation into his middle-class skin.
The room is full of mechanics having their morning lunch break. Fifteen minutes. I know that, as I recall asking Dad why my pay packet was such an odd amount. His reply, you don’t fucking expect me to pay you for sitting down.
The room is full of profanity. Swearing in all its trucking glory. They are the semi-colons and em dashes of the crew room. The full stops, too. They don’t swear like troopers or seamen but diesel fitters, for that, is what they are.
So many meanings, one word. It peppers the room like machine gun fire. Truck this and truck that. Truck him and truck them. Truck. Truck. TRUCK! Inclination and attitude spin them around. Twist the meanings. Verbal dogfights with the agility of fighter pilots. Precision bombers as they drop the f-word. The c-word too. Every man is an ace.
Perhaps this is where the idiom swear like a trucker was born, for the air soon turns bluer with more profanities and more diesel smoke. It is glorious. I bask in the memory. Bathe in the full-on un-pc language. “Roger’s Profanisaurus” made real. These are gladiators, and they wield these words like weapons.
I’m not ringside but in the arena. As they cut, thrust and fucking parry. The smell is unmistakable and unforgettable. The working man’s chanel No 5. Player’s No 6, sweat and Swarfega.
It’s legacy is my hallmark. An indelible mark. A duelists scar. For I swear, as only a journalist, one who has seen and drunk in “The Stab In The Back” can. One who witnessed the last hurrahs of Fleet Street. Walked the walk and drank the dark. The parallels between the crew room and that pub are there to see, yet I have only just noticed them. The same swearing. The same smoke. The same hard men.
If only I could recreate that fragrance. I’d bottle it and market it as the sweet smell of the working man. Man, yes, for this is a man’s world. The only women here are found in the semi-pornographic posters and calendars on the walls selling brake pipes and paint with half-naked Dolly Birds. Or in the less subtle ones. Pages torn from men’s magazines of the time.
And why are they on the toilets, too? This being the 70s, no woman would dare step inside this room. And who could blame her?
Swarfega and Soul
The floors are a deep black. Far blacker than the night. Beyond pitch black. No light could ever penetrate that layer of grime. Dulux could never match this shade. What would they call it? Sump Oil Black? Toil And Trouble? No, it would be something pompous, like “Class Struggle”.
And if they could, I’d not be shocked if it adorned the walls of some painfully trendy and pretentious bar in Hoxton. The “Fitters Arms”. Fuck that. This patina was earned, not bought. Paid for in blood, sweat and tears. No interior designer, no matter how much you paid him, her or they, could ever recreate this tone.
An aged and complex mix of oil and grease, dust and brake dust, spilt tea and overspray, the leftovers and hangovers. Echos of hard work. The last traces of a thousand lorries and vans that have been rubbed down and repainted in the huge hangar-like space the crew room sits in.
Is this where the seed of the lung cancer that killed my old man and this old man’s COPD was planted? Who knows. It is academic now. It killed him and it may well kill me.
The garage is full of smells and full of danger. It’s no playground, but it is where I grew up. Perhaps that’s why it sits like a beacon in my memory. Warning or calling? Who knows? This is a time before health and safety. And being the boss’s son. I have to prove myself, and my Dad has to prove that, too.
No job is too tough, too dangerous, or too menial for his son. Steam clean the trucks. Sweep the offices. And the workshop. Rubbing down. Masking up. Move the tyres. Paint the fucking tyres. Chip 25 tons of set concrete from the inside of the drum of a broken-down concrete mixer. Yes Dad. Anyway, one day, all this will be mine. Not likely. I may love this world in retrospect, but I did not want to live or work in it.
Oddly out of place, an old wooden cased radiogram booms out and fills the place with noise. Such a sweet tone from its valves would cost a fortune to replicate now. Caked in so much overspray it must have been perfectly preserved. To this day, I wonder what ever happened to it.
This being the 70s, it belts out hits from Bony M, ABBA, and ELO. But in my mind and my memory, it is always playing “Brown Girl in the Ring”. God alone knows why. I don’t even like the song. As soon as the break is over, that faithful friend is drowned out by the din. Thank god. And the place lights up like a discotheque; this is not just a disco; this is an arcs and sparks disco. Welding and cutting. A cacophony of hammers, drills, the whiz of air-powered orbital sanders and hammer wheel guns.
A symphony of labour, an overture to the working man made by the working man.
Hard work to the accompaniment of petrol and diesel engines. And, of course, swearing. Lots of swearing. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The steady bassline to this groove. It has a timpani and a tempo of all its own. The constant, deep boom of the enormous diesels engines provides the rhythm section.
The wheel guns shout staccato like some demented lead singer. And the clatter of dropped spanners rings out like triangles. Soloists in this hellish orchestra.
It is beautiful but a little frightening, too, like standing outside a snoring dragon’s lair. One with bad breath and flatulence as exhaust fumes. But the beast is man-made.
If a dragon farted, I expect it would smell like this. Sulphurous and oily. Perhaps a sign should read, “Here be Dragons.” But it’s not those mythical creatures that have me in awe, something just as rare these days, almost extinct Volvo F88s, Bedford TK’s and Eighteen wheeler Scammells breathing fire and brimstone into the workshop. The sounds of such engines could once stir the soul. Yet, the only places you’d find them now are in museums or in Ian Dury’s lyrics. Reasons to be Cheerful.
The men’s emissions smell too.
But it’s not just that. Like all the workers, my ever baggy boiler suit must last a week. Only then does it get washed. But it is never clean. Just a day in that environment and the echoes of all those who have gone before are soon felt. Well, smelt. The smell of stale sweat is never far from the past. But don’t worry, the exhaust fumes will soon make you forget about that. As you cough and you choke. You don’t just work here, but you become part of the work. Work here long enough, and you will never be able to scrub it off.
For Dad, this was a vocation, a calling, and while he hated his job, I think he loved working on those bloody engines. He was bloody good at it, too.
Very good. As good as I was, bad. I think he was always a little ashamed that I was so mechanically inept. And I still feel his scorn today whenever I brought him the wrong spanner. “This is a fucking 13mm, I need an 14”.
And while today I’d tell you what to do with that fucking spanner, I’d gladly fetch them until the end of time.
We’re only making plans for Andy. Apparently, I was going to be a toolmaker; you may not know this, but Sir Keir Starmer’s Dad was a toolmaker. But of course, you knew that. For him it was a metaphor for his working class past. It’s not so funny if it’s your ordained working-class future.
“And while today I’d tell you what to do with that fucking spanner, I’d gladly fetch them until the end of time”
He even bought me my tools. Not Sir Keir, obviously, but Dad. One night in the Terminus on the way home from the garage. If you are old enough for a man’s work, you are old enough for a man’s drink. So drink I did. I never stopped. Mine’s is a pint of rough cider. So that imperial set still lies abandoned in my loft. Never used, but never to be thrown away. I’m tempted to go up there now just to feel them and perhaps feel a little of Dad in them.
The Toolmaker’s Ghost
I never became a toolmaker, but after I left college, I worked for Dad briefly until he gave me the sack. The order of the DCM – don’t come Monday. The tin tack. You’re Fired. Before, it was a catchphrase. The plan was that I’d work in all aspects of the garage before he handed me the reins. I’d have run it into the ground. My time in the parts department was too much. A step too far for a boy who had become a man without his Dad ever noticing. Or even caring. Too busy building empires. Or a pack of cards. I was going to be a photographer. And I did.
Bideford’s Rejection Letter
I never really understood why this came as such a shock to Dad. I don’t think the clues were that hard to spot. No shit, Sherlock. I’d been away at Plymouth College of Art and Design for four years. Studying, guess what? Photography, film and television. Prior to that, I’d spent a year in the RAF photographic section. In lieu of the minimum entry qualifications, it’s the very thing that gave the portfolio to attend and my passport out of hell. I just think Dad thought it was some phase I was going through, like making model aeroplanes or trainspotting. That I’d grow out of it, see the light and get a real man’s job. With him.
I never fitted in at school or, indeed, in Bideford. I always felt I was on the outside looking in. I never felt like I belonged. Certainly, not in the way Dad did. It is part of me. But I was never part of it. At times, I even begrudge its presence. Was I born that way? Or was I made? I hated school then. I despise it now.
There are no rose-tinted memories of that shit hole. I fantasise over what I might have achieved if I’d had a decent education. If they’d done their job. Worked with me rather than against me. Diagnosed my dyslexia and dyspraxia. Discovered I was neurodivergent. Instead of just branding me thick. The easy option. In the parallel universe, I’ve constructed in my head, I could have been a barrister if only I’d learnt my eight times table or learnt to spell aardvark.
Bideford School and Community College. Even the name sounds dreadful. It’s only saving grace, the art club. The one place in school where all the other misfits and weirdos could and did seek sanctuary.
A place where we could hide from bullies. The place that lit the fuse on my passion for art. A proper darkroom and a mentor, too.
That I saw the “Picasso’s Picassos” exhibition in London was down to, my art teacher dragging us all up to see it. I lives on in me even now. In the paintings on the wall. I had the heart of an artist even then. I am an artist. I will always be an artist. Perhaps that was the problem.
All the while, the sirens of the shipyard, the toy factory, and the garage were calling. But with some luck, I avoided the rocks.
Thankfully and mercifully, there was a home for such misfits and so-called wastrels. A place we could all be different together. All different but the same. Peas from a pod. Unique but uniform.
All at Art College. Fuck me, Art College in the 80s. Bullseye. The cultural jackpot. My cultural home. At last, I fitted in. At last, I felt like part of the family. Sex & Drugs & Duran Duran. Though sadly, not in that order.
Why on earth did I ever go back to Bideford when I graduated?
I didn’t know then. I still don’t know now. Why? I think it had something to do with self-doubt. Self-doubt. Who’d have guessed? Where on earth could that have come from? I’ve been plagued with it all my life. And imposters syndrome. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I have no faith in my work as a writer or a photographer. I guess I never will. Despite all that, I still miss my Dad.
Fast-Forward to Gravy
Suddenly, the spell is broken.
We need all hands on deck as we try to turn a tricky right at the junction. Being a left-hand drive, in the interest of safety, we both need to keep an eye out for traffic.
I am acutely aware that gravy is running down my jumper. A white jumper, of course.
With that thought, my mind speeds away. Like a cerebral video recorder stuck on fast-forward. I whizz and zip through my life. Through the static. Through the past. Back to the present.
In milliseconds, my life flashes before my eyes. Though college. The return and escape from Bideford. Going back to Plymouth. Coming up to London. Through the utter insane madness of life as a photographer’s assistant.
Alcohol blurs much of the past, but I can still catch parts of the highlight reel. We zip past time as a photographer’s agent. Past the parties and the booze. Watch out, here comes Fleet Street. Time as an outsider. Time as an insider. Time as a picture editor. The youngest on the street. TV and radio. Almost famous. Almost. Blink and you missed it.
The ups. The downs. The downs. The downs. Snakes and ladders. Redundancy. Starting again at the bottom as a photographer. Through war and natural disasters. Seeing that which can’t be unseen. The night terrors. Redundancy. From contender to has been in the blink of an eye. Redundancy. Redundancy again. From youth to just an old man with grey hair and technicolour memories.
And dark brown gravy running down his jumper.
Back to sitting in the Rav4 wearing that oh-so-stylish hat. And odd sandals. I don’t mean odd as in strange. But odd as in different pairs.
But that’s me. A life lived full. Full on. Full of contradictions. I was never at home in a boiler suit, nor a suit and tie. I guess I never will.
I was caught between my working-class origins and my middle-class pretence. The imposter’s syndrome. The guilt. I may have escaped the garage. Or did I?
Did it escape me?
Will I always be trapped by my past?
No amount of Swarfega could ever wash that away. And why should it? I’m proud of my heritage. Proud of who I am. Proud of my father. What I’d give to tell him. One more pint of rough cider in the Terminus. One for the road. Just one more.
I just need to accept who I am. Make peace with myself and the past.
I can still smell the garage. The oil. The scent of my father. Even after all these years, I can still picture Dad in his blue boiler suit.
Just a bit too small.
Just a bit too tight around the belly.
I bet if I looked hard, I’d see gravy stains, too.
Just below the white S&B Commercials patch above his heart. Just where it should be. The B in S&B, the b, the bear, not because he was nice and cuddly, but because he’d tear you apart. The proverbial bear with a sore head. Yet his bark could be worse than his bite.
What a journey. What a pie. And it was half fucking price. Result. Proustian madeleine? Fuck off. Pukka Pie.
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